a-journey-through-time-the-long-prehistory-of-artificial-intelligence

According to Aristotle, while living things moved themselves at will, inanimate things moved according to their natures: heavy things, made of earth or water, descended, while light things, made of air or fire, ascended. Twenty years later, the French King Henri IV hired the Italian engineer Tomaso Francini to build him some waterworks for the royal palace at Saint Germain en Laye. In 1650, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher offered an early design of a hydraulic organ with automata, governed by a pinned cylinder and including a dancing skeleton. The designers of the automatic loom used automata and automatic musical instruments as their model; then Charles Babbage -- the English mathematician who designed the first mechanical computers during the 1830s, the Analytical and Difference Engines -- in turn used the automatic loom as his model.