Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble,…

Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France in 1709 as Jacques Vaucanson (the particle "de" was later added to his name by the Académie des Sciences).

The tenth child, son of a glove-maker, he had grown up poor, and in his youth he reportedly aspired to become a clockmaker.

He had studied under the Jesuits and later joined the Order of the Minims in Lyon.

It was his intention at the time to follow a course of religious studies, but he regained his interest in mechanical devices after meeting the surgeon Le Cat, from whom he would learn the details of anatomy.

This new knowledge had allowed him to develop his first mechanical devices that mimicked biological vital functions such as circulation, respiration, and digestion.

At just eighteen years of age, Vaucanson had been given his own workshop in Lyon, and a grant from a nobleman to construct a set of machines.

In that same year of 1727, there was a visit from one of the governing heads of Les Minimes.

Vaucanson decided to make some androids.

The automatons would serve dinner and clear the tables for the visiting politicians.

However, one government official declared that he thought Vaucanson's tendencies "profane", and ordered that his workshop be destroyed.

Vaucanson in 1737 built The Flute Player, a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs.

The figure's fingers were not pliable enough to play the flute correctly, so Vaucanson has had to glove the creation in skin.

He presents his creation to the Académie des Sciences the following year, in early 1738.

At the time, mechanical creatures are somewhat a fad in Europe, but most can be classified as toys; de Vaucanson's creations are recognized as being revolutionary in their mechanical lifelike sophistication.

Later this year, he creates two additional automatons, The Tambourine Player and The Digesting Duck, which is considered his masterpiece.

The duck has over four hundred moving parts in each wing alone, and can flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate.

Although Vaucanson's duck supposedly demonstrated digestion accurately, his duck actually contained a hidden compartment of "digested food", so that what the duck defecated was not the same as what it ate; the duck would eat a mixture of water and seed and excrete a mixture of bread crumbs and green dye that appeared to the onlooker indistinguishable from real excrement.

Although such "frauds" were sometimes controversial, they were common enough because such scientific demonstrations needed to entertain the wealthy and powerful to attract their patronage.

Vaucanson is credited as having invented the world's first flexible rubber tube while in the process of building the duck's intestines.