Homer Jacobsen

Homer Jacobsen illustrated basic self-replication, dealing with artificial life, in the 1950s with a model train set -- a seed "organism" consisting of a "head" and "tail" boxcar could use the simple rules of the system to consistently create new "organisms" identical to itself, so long as there was a random pool of new boxcars to draw from. More information dealing with Jacobsen, can be found on the artificial life article. A mention of Homer Jacobsen, as well as a large documentation on artificial life may be found here as well as Edward F. Moore's article.