The French Encyclopaedists described Vaucanson as a demigod and praised him for his remarkable automatons. For the first time, thanks to the genius of the human mind, artificial beings were able, to play a musical instrument perfectly or behave like real living beings.Voltaire even considered Vaucanson as Prometheus' rival :

At that time, he was in frequent contact with Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a famous surgeon working in the city of Rouen's general hospital, called "Hôtel Dieu". The young Vaucanson wanted to further develop knowledge in anatomy by making " living anatomies ". Another surgeon, François Quesnay, encouraged him to create artificial creatures in order to put in evidence most of human or animal biological functions.

From 1733, Vaucanson devoted himself to his first android : " The transverse flute player", that he finished four years later. The following year, he opened his exhibition to the public in the reception room of the Hôtel de Longueville in Paris. In spite of an expensive admission ticket, it was a triumph.

And in addition to that, M. Jacques de Vaucanson's dissertation had all the clarity and precision of which this machine is capable, which proves both the intelligence of the creator and his extensive knowledge in all the mechanical parts. "

An exhibition leaflet from that period provides additional details : "It is a life-sized man dressed in a savage and who plays eleven tunes on the transverse flute, with movements imitating those of the lips, fingers and breath of a living man."

The Duke of Luynes, chronicler at the Royal Court, wrote in his memoirs : "What makes this machine singular is the fact that the sounds are more or less loud, and that any other flute can replace the one which is being played… Air really blows out through the mouth and the fingers actually play. The fingers are carved in wood with a piece of leather at the point where they cover the holes. The entire figure is made of wood with the exception of the arms which are made of cardboard".

Towards the end of the year 1738, the success of the talented musician diminished. Vaucanson thus added two other automatons to the exhibition in order to revive interest in it. And it was successful once again.

In 1741, Rigollay de Juvigny made the following description of the bird's mechanism : "Everyone was allowed to look inside the pedestal where all the wheels, levers and strings were situated and transmitted the movement through the legs of the animal to all the different parts of its body which were also apparent to the eye. As with the flute player, a weight was the unique power source responsible for all the movement."

into its stomach, are copied from nature; the food is digested in the stomach as it is in real animals, by dissolution and not by trituration, as a number of physicists have claimed it; but this is what I intend to demonstrate and show upon that occasion. The material digested in the stomach passes through tubes, as it does through the entrails in the animal, to the anus, where there is a sphincter to allow its release."

" I do not claim that this digestion is a perfect digestion, able to make blood and nourishing particles to nurture the animal; to reproach me for this, I think, would show bad grace. I only claim to imitate the mechanics of this action in three parts which are: firstly, swallowing the grain; secondly, macerating, cooking or dissolving it; thirdly, expelling it in a markedly changed state."

However, the three acts needed means and perhaps these means will deserve some attention from the persons who would demand more accuracy. They will see the expedients that we used to make the artificial duck take the grain, suck it up into its stomach, and there, in a little space, build a chemical laboratory, to break down the main integral parts from it, and make it go out with no limit, through some convolutions of pipes, at an all opposed end of its body."

is the radius; it turns in a cavity of the humerus, and its other ends are attached to the little bones of the end of the wing, just like the animal. The inspection of the machine will let oneself know the imitation of nature better than a longer detail, that would look too much like an anatomical explanation."

"Assuredly, the movements of those wings are not similar to those we can see in great masterpieces, such as the Cock of the clocks in Lyons and in Strasbourg. To prove that, the whole mechanism of the artificial duck will be seen exposed, my objective being rather to demonstrate than to simply show a machine. Maybe several ladies, or people who only like the appearance of the animals, would have prefered to see it completely covered; but in addition to the fact that I was asked for it, I am very pleased that it is not pulled the wool over it, and that we can see all the inside piece of work."

"I think that the attentive people will understand the difficulty to make my automaton perform so many different movements; for instance, when it rises up onto its feet, and it steers its neck to the right and to the left. They will know all the changes of the different fulcrums; they will even see that what acted as a fulcrum for a mobile part, becomes then mobile on this part which becomes fixed itself. At last, they will discover an infinity of mechanical combinations."

When the visitors were less numerous, Vaucanson started a triumphant wide tour through France, and then in Italy and England.

Finally, he lost interest in automatons quite quickly because, when he had been appointed General Inspector in silk manufactures in 1741, he had to reorganize the French silk industry. This led him to build numerous machines, as well as perfected tools used for their manufacturing.

However, for nearly 40 years, he worked on the plan to make "an automaton's face which would closely imitate the animal processes by its movements: blood circulation, breathing, digestion, the set of muscles, tendons, nerves, and so far…"

This plan could have succeeded, since he invented the rubberpipe which could have allowed him to make up the circulatory apparatus of his automaton. But alas, he died in 1782.

Today, not much about these automatons has been left, except several photographs on glass plates taken around 1850. The duck burnt in a museum of Nijninovgorod in Russia around 1879. Both musician automatons were lost or destroyed at the beginning of the 19th century.

Frédéric Vidoni created this automaton that we can see in the Museum of the automatons in Grenoble, in order to pay tribute to Vaucanson.