The Enid Blyton Society

On Friday, following a hospital appointment in London, I went to the Robots Exhibition at the Science Museum and was absolutely enthralled by it. I hadn't realised to what extent humanoid robots were used in some societies. As well as working in industry they take orders at restaurants, direct people around buildings, give speeches at conferences, work with autistic children and are a source of company and entertainment for hospital patients.

There were all kinds of early mechanical devices on display, dating from the mediæval period onwards, while some of the more modern robots looked like extremely life-like dolls - almost human in appearance.

My favourite of the older pieces was an intricate automaton dating from the late 1700s (link below). It was built in London by a Swiss mechanician, Henri Maillardet, and it draws four beautifully detailed pictures and writes three poems (one in English and two in French). It was on loan from Philadelphia and was on display in a huge glass case so I didn't get to see it in action, but there was a video of it in action alongside the exhibit. I didn't realise that early automatons had been capable of so much until I watched the film Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

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When it came to the modern robots, Pepper was my favourite (link below). It was designed by French company Aldebaran Robotics and Japanese company SoftBank and it's a friendly-looking, interactive robot about four feet high, incredibly fluid in its movements. It's remarkable the way it converses with people (in numerous languages!)

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Unfortunately the exhibition is finishing today at the Science Museum, but I believe it's going to Manchester in the near future. Has anyone else seen it? It's well worth going if you get the chance.

Wow, utterly amazing, watching both the links. The older robot drawing was out of this world, especially when you consider the age here.

I would suspect in a few years, our best friends will be robots!

Fantastic, Anita. I really enjoyed watching the clips. Thank you for posting the links.

Thanks for the links Anita. The automaton in the first clip is amazing! the mind boggles how someone could invent that so that each bump in the cog corresponded to a hand movement! How would you even begin to create such an amazing machine!

Oh wow — the writing and drawing automaton is incredible!! In some ways, even more so than Pepper the modern-day robot. We're mostly used now to the idea that clever digital technology can do just about anything, but to create a machine as complex as that first one more than 200 years ago, all out of cogs and levers and springs, before anything like computers had even been thought of... (Reminds me, too, that I was interested in the film Hugo when it came out, but didn't ever get around to seeing it — I think that was at about the time when I'd only just moved to the UK and I had too much else to think about. I must get hold of it one day.)

Hugo is a lovely film, Courtenay. I didn't see it at the cinema but I have the DVD and it includes some interesting bonus material about automatons. One of these days I hope to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret but it's not available in my local library at the moment. Brian Selznick is an artist as well as a writer and his books are full of the most exquisite illustrations.