Business: Demons and Monsters

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"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a compulsive motion agitated its limbs."

Mary Shelley's succulent description of Victor Frankenstein's moment of triumph—a moment that Hollywood traditionally illustrated with flashes of lightning and showers of sparks—dramatizes one of the most fundamental metaphors in mythology: the creation of an artificial man. It is an idea that can be traced back to the folklore of man's own creation. According to Greek legend, the first humans were robots formed out of clay by the Titan Prometheus.

The first automata in actual history were more modest in concept. Archytas of Tarentum (400-350 B.C.) built a wooden dove that was reputed to have flown. In the 2nd century B.C., Hero of Alexandria wrote a book, De Automatis, that described a mechanical theater with robot figures that marched and danced in various temple ceremonies. But the king of all robotmakers was Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772-1838), creator of the metronome, who also constructed an automatic orchestra called the Panharmonicon, which could simulate violins, cellos, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, drums, cymbals and triangle. For this contraption, the inventor commissioned Beethoven to compose his Vittoria Symphony, Maelzel also toured America with a robot chess player that was actually operated from inside by a hunchbacked Alsatian dwarf named Schlumberger.

These were mere toys, however, compared with the persistent and half-forbidden dream of an artificial man.-* St. Albertus Magnus, the 13th century German philosopher, was said to have spent 30 years constructing a servant of "deceptively human appearance" out of metal, wood, glass, wax and leather. This creature allegedly opened the door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who was himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported to have created out of clay a giant robot known as a golem. This figure, which came to life when a tablet with a divine name, shem, was placed in its mouth, was supposed to protect the Jews from persecution, but some accounts claim that its masters tried to use it for unworthy purposes, and others report that it turned upon its creators.

To almost all these versions of the legend of the artificial man there clung the aura of evil. To create a living being was God's role; to imitate God was blasphemous, even diabolic, and thus doomed to disaster. Hence Frankenstein.