13th Century Robot

A team from the USA history channel were on campus last month in the Faculty of Engineering to talk about some very old robots. They were there to film a replica of the mechanism for al-Jazari's drinking boat; a boat full of musical automata first constructed in 1206. Professor Noel Sharkey from Computer Science built the core of the device –"bodged it together from a pile of rubbish", he says – to demonstrate how it could have been programmed. The previous claim for the world's oldest programmable automata is for a machine built by Leonardo da Vinci in 1478.

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via MetaFilter's Vintage androids