The marvellous, mechanical shitting duck

30 May 1739

Well, if it’s 30 May, it must be... YES, THAT’S RIGHT! The 287th anniversary of the unveiling of Jacques de Vaucanson’s marvellous, mechanical shitting duck.

That’s it in the middle there, between his pipe and tabor-playing automaton and his flute-playing automaton, although you can get a slightly better idea what it looked like from this 1998 replica by Jacques Fréderic Vidoni.

The 18th century original was life-size, made of hundreds of parts, and its ‘skin’ was perforated gold-plated copper, which meant you could see its inner workings. Oh, and it swallowed corn and grain, waited a bit, and then shat.

Vaucanson charged people three livres a pop to come and see his marvellous mechanical mountings – about a week’s wages for the average Parisian – and made far more money than he’d borrowed to put the show on.

And he impressed Voltaire, who called him “Prometheus’s rival” and advised Frederick the Great to invite Vaucanson to the Berlin court. (Jacques said no, because he had an idea he could make more money in France.) Voltaire also said

Without the voice of [Paris Opera soprano] le Maure and Vaucanson’s duck, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France

so he might have had his tongue in his cheek slightly.

Jacques, it turned out, was right about being able to make a shitload of cash (I paraphrase slightly) if he stayed in France, because he had caught the eye and favour of the king, but it didn’t go entirely smoothly. Louis XV made him inspector of the silk industry, so he designed new automatic looms, which pissed the silk workers off no end, and they started hurling stones at him in the street and generally rebelling against the idea they could be replaced.

Jacques, son of a glovemaker, but not perhaps a born diplomat, responded by building a loom that could be operated by a donkey. The king was on his side, though, and things did not go brilliantly for the silk workers. (You may wish to pause here to ponder whether progress is possible without sacrifice on at least somebody’s part. Or you may not.)

Here is Jacques, incidentally – pictured here thinking “I invent the first all-metal lathe, and that Coates bastard’s writing about my shitting duck again, isn’t he?”

Maybe he’s also wondering if he’s an ancestor of Tommy Cooper

Perhaps the greatest blow to Vaucanson’s reputation, however, came in 1783 – mercifully for him, a year after he died – when someone spotted that the Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, did not, in fact, digest. Why this should have come as a surprise to anyone, I don’t know, but apparently it did. No, an automaton built in Seventeen-Thirty-Bleedin’-Nine didn’t actually have a fully working digestive system, it was a fraud! Well, duh. (Someone even drew what they thought the inside of it looked like for Scientific American in 1899. They were wrong.)

It had a clever set of rubber intestines, but the food stopped at the bottom of the mouth tube and a separate mechanism (with a hidden compartment) at the other end shat out the pre-loaded faeces after a suitable pause. The duck pooh was, apparently, breadcrumbs which had been dyed green. You can read more in Living Dolls: A Magical History Of The Quest For Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood.

...or you can look at Jacques Fréderic Vidoni’s replica in action. It sold at auction in 2013 for a reported €36,000.