Friedrich Von Knauss |
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In their book "The automaton by the Jaquet-Droz" Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz assert that : "Among the automatons representing writers, the only one which was created before the Pierre Jaquet-Droz's automaton (14 years before - see "the Jaquet-Droz's three androids" part) is the one made by Friedrich Von Knauss (it still exists in the "Gewerbe Museum", Vienna). Extremely remarkable, Von Knauss's writer is able to write a long text. However, we can notice that its mechanism is not situated in the body of the character, but in a quite bulky sphere, and this system suppressed several difficulties of those that Pierre Jaquet-Droz had to overcome."
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In the centre, a little shelf is erecting a vertical little table, which supports the sheet of paper on which the automaton, with its quite long arm, writes the characters previously printed on a cylinder. At each end of line, the goddess puts up her hand and the sheet of paper moves, thus ensuring to start again a new line. The entire sheet of paper is covered in fifteen minutes."
"After having written several characters, the writer automatically dips its quill into the ink pot which is in front of him. A special mechanism situated at the rear side moves the little table to the left after each letter. When a line is finished, the little table is pushed both to the horizontal and vertical directions. If the cylinder is taken out of the mechanism, we can manually operate the levers register, thus "dictating" to the writer what we want him to write". von Knauss was also probably the maker of a flageolet player and of four talking machines of which no trace is left. |