Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Karakuri ningyo man.


Hisashige Tanaka was a Japanese engineer/artist living in the Edo period (1603 to 1868). He actually lived from 1799 to 1881. He built the tricky, playful robots called Karakuri Ningyo, and probably created the most intricate and detailed examples.


He is best known for the Myriad Year Clock, or Japanese perpetual clock. But what I'm interested in is the Bow Shooting Boy, or Yumi-iri Doji, a mechanical wonder that took the art of robot making to the highest level. A young archer would pull an arrow from his quiver, load his bow and shoot a target in the bullseye.


He built these mechanical dolls from early on and even travelled the country in his early 20`s showing them off to the delight of all. In fact he created a puzzle box when he was 8 that couldn`t be opened until he revealed the secret. To give you an idea of the level of detail he worked at, his Yumi-iri Doji would even smirk when it was a good shot or look sad when he missed!


Hisashige was practical too. When the Japanese economy tightened up in the 1830`s and obvious luxuries were looked down upon, he moved to the manufacturing centre of Osaka to work on more useful household devices. Among them a collapsable candle, and the invention that started his climb up the industrialist ladder, the Mujin-to lamp. He spent so much time staying up late working on his inventions he probably got pissed off and invented it to save his eyesight. The genuis of the lamp was an air pump that created pressure in the oil reservoir, forcing it into the wick. The result was an intense light for the size of the lamp. In the end he turned the nighttime into productive time for the Japanese.


He founded his own engineering company,Tanaka Seizosho, in 1875. After several permutations and mergers it turned into Toshiba Corporation in 1978.

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