I spent the past Memorial Day weekend with my girlfriend’s family in the lovely town of Burlington, Vermont. One of the highlights was a trip to the Shelburne Museum, an outdoor museum nestled amongst the Adirondack Mountains that highlights Vermont history and American Folk Art from the late 19^th century. It’s a sprawling campus that covers many periods and some of the more interesting pieces I found were tucked away in a room of the toys and dolls exhibit.

Automata are large wind-up toys that stand about 3 feet tall that were displayed in parlors in the late-19^th, early-20^th century. Though popular in France, some made their way into the hands of weathly patrons from the States. The Shelburne Museum has about 30 pieces that were created by Gustave Vichy of Paris, France.

The photos don’t really do them justice as they are a blend of sculpture, motion, and engineering. At first glance they can appear a bit creepy — obviously dolls but their motions are quite realistically human. They draw you in to where you almost want to interact with them at some human level, but then become creeped out at the thought — a symptom of the “uncanny valley” perhaps. Once you get past that, they are quite an impressive and beautiful feat. It was a time when the world was quickly becoming mechanized, the age of industry was usurping the roles all sorts of human endeavors. Where was all this technology taking us? Can we control it? Can we even understand it? Questions that we are still asking to this day.

But I’m sure these little androids where quite the marvel at the time, maybe they sparked the same emotions and questions that come to us when we look at something like Asimo today.

Of course to appreciate these guys you need to see them in action. There’s not a whole lot available on the Internet, but with a little digging I was able to turn up a little clip that features a similar late-19^th century automata done by the same creator: