Outside of horror movies, music boxes are pretty cool, but their big flaw is that they can only play a few bars of one song. That's why Taiwanese company Tevofy Technology has sought to update the music box for the modern age, in the form of the Music Robot Box, or Muro Box. Traditional music boxes have a cylinder of pins that, as they turn, pluck the tines of a steel comb that, as they vibrate, make a sound. The principles are similar to that of hammers hitting piano strings, although you're limited by the size of the cylinder and the notes the comb has been cut to play. The difference between that and MuRo, is that the cylinder has been replaced with several computer-controlled rings.

Since the early industrial age, we've been fascinated by self-operating devices. They represent the humanization of technology. Today, it is software that that's becoming more human -- most obviously "chatbots." But how do these machines work? First, wind back time and explore an earlier -- yet similar -- technology.

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.

For centuries people have had a fascination for automatons. In the early industrial age automatons symbolized the humanization of machines, and today this extends into software and apps. Perhaps the most pronounced example of this are so-called "chat-bots." How do these machines work? A classic early automaton was the mechanical music box.