Martin Scorsese’s Hugo helped introduce many people to the wonder of automatons — i.e., mechanical people and other figures. But there’s a lot more to automatons than Scorsese’s film revealed, ...

Robots are increasingly becoming a part of modern life, but their roots go surprisingly far back. Most early automatons were created as entertainment for wealthy owners and their mechanisms frequently ...

Concepts of robotics have been floating around the human consciousness since 3500 BCE. Centuries before the term “robot” (literally, “forced labor” in Czech) was coined, philosophers, engineers, and ...

Although the 18th and early 19th century might be described as the golden era of automatons – all the more so as clockwork was then considered an effective metaphor for the workings of the human body ...