Automata

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of real and imagined machines that appear to be living, and the questions they raise about life and creation. Even in myth they are made by humans, not born. The classical Greeks built some and designed others, but the knowledge of how to make automata and the principles behind them was lost in the Latin Christian West, remaining in the Greek-speaking and Arabic-speaking world. Western travellers to those regions struggled to explain what they saw, attributing magical powers. The advance of clockwork raised further questions about what was distinctly human, prompting Hobbes to argue that humans were sophisticated machines, an argument explored in the Enlightenment and beyond.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Schaffer 25 episodes
  Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University
• Elly Truitt 2 episodes
  Associate Professor of Medieval History at Bryn Mawr College
• Franziska Kohlt 2 episodes
  Doctoral Researcher in English Literature and the History of Science at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination
  Minsoo Kang (Harvard University Press, 2011) Google Books →
• Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
  Adrienne Mayor (Princeton University Press, forthcoming November 2018) Google Books →
• The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick
  Jessica Riskin (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Google Books →
• Medieval Robots: Magic, Mechanism, Nature, and Art
  E. R. Truitt (University of Pennsylvania, 2015)
• Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self
  Adelheid Voskuhl (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
  Gaby Wood (Faber & Faber, 2002) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Artificial Intelligence
  
  8 Dec, 2005 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems
• Perpetual Motion
  
  24 Sep, 2015 530 Physics
• Artificial Intelligence
  
  29 Apr, 1999 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems
• Time
  
  30 Dec, 1999 110 Metaphysics
• Anatomy
  
  14 Feb, 2002 610 Medicine and health
• Renaissance Magic
  
  17 Jun, 2004 130 Parapsychology and occultism
• The Antikythera Mechanism
  
  14 Nov, 2024 520 Astronomy
• The Brain
  
  8 May, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• The Measurement of Time
  
  29 Mar, 2012 520 Astronomy

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b0bk1c4d

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d

Auto-category: 600 (Technology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In the 10th century, lifelike golden lions guarded the Byzantine court, moving and roaring.