Jacques de Vaucanson (February 24th 1709, Grenoble - November 21st 1782, Paris) is a French inventor and mechanic.
Work
It is known for its production of Automate S, of which a duck which gave the illusion to eat, to digest and eliminate food and water that it introduced.
Extremely of its creations, it also worked for industry with machines facilitating the weaving of silk, which been worth to him to be continued with stone blows, in Lyon, by workmen of silk who complained that it sought to simplify the trades. Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin tells that, to be avenged for these Lyons workmen, he invented a trade on which an ass carried out a fabric with flowers.
It created a chain which bears its name as well as a machine to manufacture the always equal meshs of them.
Its goal was to facilitate the human activity, which led it to sit at the Academy of Science and to take part in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D' Alembert.
Some automats
-
the player of flute.
- the duck, exposed in 1844 to the Palais Royal, is the only automat of Vaucanson to be preserved, bought in 1840 by Georges Tiets, mechanic.
- the player of tambourine.
Homages
-
There exists a college Vaucanson with Tours and another in its birthplace in Grenoble.
- In the bessinée band Mysterious morning, midday and evening of Jean-Claude Forest, a robot androïde bears the name of Wladimir Vaucanson.
- In the series of Cartoon Keep of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim, the duchy of Vaucanson, whose most famous representative is the duck Herbert duke of Vaucanson, is famous for its know-how without equal in the realization of flying automats.
- Jacques de Vaucanson appears in the novel anatomical Venus of Xavier Mauméjean.
- Voltaire made on him the following worms: “Bold Vaucanson, rival of Prométhée,/Seemed, of nature imitating the springs,/Prendre the fire of heaven to animate the bodies. ”
Iconography
- Joseph Boze, Portrait of Jacques de Vaucanson, academician , oil on fabric, 70 by 58 cm, Paris, Academy of Science, given by Boze to the Academy in 1784.
References
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