The creation of robots and androids has always fascinated mankind. There are accounts of automatons in ancient mythology such as the artisan/god Hephaestus who created divine machines like the bronze man Talos to defend Crete. There are accounts of Greek temples housing "god" machines that belched smoke, replicated thunder and even bled. and philosophers like Aristotle mused about robots replacing slaves. But throughout history, there have been actual attempts to construct such mechanisms. This is where mythology and reality blur. The Physical proof of such pursuits came in the form of the Antikythera mechanism (150 to 100 BC), recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1900/1901. The device  served to calculate the positions of stars and planets.   Other notorious accounts of automatons appear in the 8th and 9th centuries. Wind powered automatons appeared in the Abbasid Palaces of Baghdad and the Arabic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (writing under the name of Geber) recorded his methods of constructing snake, scorpion and human automatons in The … [Read more...] about Automatons: Imitation of Life