Hacker Cinema
Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams
2013 · Film · documentary · 60 min
Directed by Nic Stacey
Documentary presented by Professor Simon Schaffer which charts the amazing and untold story of automata - extraordinary clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic and recreate life. The film brings the past to life in vivid detail as we see how and why these masterpieces were built. Travelling around Europe, Simon uncovers the history of these machines and shows us some of the most spectacular examples, from an entire working automaton city to a small boy who can be programmed to write and even a device that can play chess. All the machines Simon visits show a level of technical sophistication and ambition that still amazes today.
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1 comment on Hacker News
It's one of the three Jacquet-Droz automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata . The clip is from the 2013 BBC documentary "Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0229pbp , written and presented by Simon Schaffer. I should probably have linked this slightly longer clip https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019ng2n instead.