Automatons in the NY Times

Today's New York Times has an article about the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection, four-hundred years of music boxes, proto-robots, and mechanical musical instruments recently acquired by the Morris Museum in New Jersey.

"Our sense of wonder is tweaked when we see, for example, a two-and-a-half-foot-high early-20th-century automaton with a little boy reaching for a jar of marmalade for his biscuit. As he reaches up, a door opens and the jar revolves, revealing the animated face of his scolding grandmother. A fly buzzes in the cabinet while a tiny mouse emerges from an apple.

In addition to the craft of it, this object, like virtually everything in the collection, is a piece of theater, an authentic historical performance: a time machine, if you will, visiting from the past."

Link (free site reg. required)

UPDATE: As BB reader Rob Iracane so kindly points out, the Morris Museum Web site has nice multimedia clips of the various machines in action. Link