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Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

In this hour 21st century, we've become pretty much accustomed to the idea of robots being able to move around almost like people or other animals.

It doesn't always go smoothly.

Robot fail videos are one of my favorite categories, but we've seen robots do everything from put together a car to run a foot race.

However, the idea of automata, meaning moving mechanical devices, sometimes designed to imitate

life, actually dates back thousands of years.

The word automaton is derived from the ancient Greek word automatose, which means self-acting,

and the Greeks built some of the earliest

machines that emulated living creatures, from mechanical dolphins and eagles that entertained

crowds at the Olympic Games to a mechanical puppet theater. In Renaissance Europe, churchgoers

marveled at mechanized angels. In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight that could move its

limbs, though it's not clear whether he ever actually built it. In the early 1800s, a particularly

marvelous human-like machine reached new heights of complexity and even mimicked humans' artistic

self-expression.

We are talking about Malar Day's automaton, a device created around the year 1800 by Swiss

mechanical designer Henri Malar Day, who worked in London building clocks and other machines.

The automaton, which resembles a human boy sitting at a table with a pen in hand, is capable of making four different detailed drawings and writing out three different poems, two in French and one in English.

This automaton is currently housed by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, one of the nation's foremost science and technology education centers,

which acquired the automaton from the estate of a wealthy Philadelphian back in 1928, and has spent

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