Beep.

So this is weird. I was combing the Inet looking for likely story ideas when I came across this CBC article about a Georgia Tech professor who looked at the attraction people have for vacuum cleaners. Ok, ok. The little Robot vacs called Roombas. I won't go on about it here because this article is much better written than anything I could come up with. Here's the link: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/10/02/roomba-study.html

But I got going on about it and had to find out what some of the first robots were like. Once again I'm off on another tangent. I'll be back to musical instruments soon.

Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, we'll call him Al-Jazari, made several robots, or automata, around the year 1200. Power for the machines was limited to clockwork mechanisms, water flow (from one vessel to another) or animal power. Electrical power was a few years away. One real big example of his early work is the elephant clock. Its actually a water clock placed on top of a real big wooden elephant. The body of the beast hides the mechanism and water. The top part is the exciting bit.

Later on he built the most robotic (at least to our idea of what a modern robot should be)of his mechanical inventions. These were true humaniod automata. And they were programmable. A camshaft ran through the device, and depending on where the bumps, or pegs were placed on the shaft, the robots, in this case a band of musicians, would alter what they "played". Mainly it was drums or cymbals that were struck. You essesntially got a different group of noises, but still, it was controllable.