"Obedience... /Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame/ A mechanized automaton."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Queen Mab" (1813)
Most people think of self-operating machines as twentieth-century inventions. Although Isaac Asimov coined the word "robotics" in 1942, and Grey Walter built the first electronic autonomous robots in 1948, the first automaton for which we have good evidence was a boat with four mechanical musicians. It was built more than eight hundred years ago by Islamic scholar AI-Jazari (1150-1220).
AI-Jazari, considered by some to be the father of robotics, wrote his Kitab fima'rifatal-hiyalal-handasiyya (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) in about 1206, while he was the palace chief engineer in Diyarbakir (located in the southeast of present-day Turkey). The book describes a boat he constructed that floated on the palace lake and entertained guests at parties with music from a flute, a harp, and two drums played by automatons. The drummers contained rotating cylinders with movable pegs. As the cylinder rotated, the pegs would strike levers that caused the drums to be played. Changing the number and location of the pegs produced different rhythms, and so the automaton was entirely programmable.
Automatons created in subseguent centuries, mainly for entertainment purposes, continued to play musical instruments, along with other activities that could be recreated in a sufficiently realistic manner.
Today, factories increasingly use robots— essentially automatons powered by electricity—for jobs that require speed, precision, strength, and/or endurance. Robots build cars, package goods, manufacture circuit boards, and perform many other tasks. Almost a million robots were in operation around the world in 2007, and the International Federation of Robotics expects this number to reach 1.2 million by the end of 2010.
