He talked about Vaucanson’s and Drosz’s automata, about bodies that did not lose will or strength, that did not give in to exhaustion at the end of the day, and explained that rest was necessary to conserve a finite amount of energy. In 1854, Hermann von Helmholtz gave a lecture, “On the Interaction of Natural Forces.” He was already well-known for his work on energy conservation and thermodynamics. The ducks and dolls became a curiosity, little tchotchkes and children’s toys produced in an assembly line, caught up in the production of other mass goods Labour(ing), as Marx calls it in the The Grundrisse, which was once so piecemeal, metamorphosed into “an automatic system of machinery” (italics mine). The machines they made and inspired did the work of hundreds of workers: breaking things, mixing raw material, moulding it, packing it. Like Jacques Vaucanson, other mechanical engineers of automatons were hired by the court and moved to alter the manufacturing and production process within factories, building new machines that changed how silk was produced or perfecting other measuring processes. Jaquet-Droz automata, musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Neuchâtel, photograph by Rama, via Wikimedia Commonsīut the nineteenth century rolled in, and the magicians, like everyone else, were caught up in the thrall of industrialisation-automata turned into a process of automation.
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