Shitting duck of France

The Shitting Duck of France was an automaton duck created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. The mechanical duck demonstrated the ability eat kernels of grain, metabolise, and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this, it was hoped by Vaucanson that it was possible. Voltaire wrote: "Without the shitting duck, there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France."

Mechanism

The duck stretched its neck to take grain from a hand and then swallowed and digested it. It drank, paddled and quacked, and imitated the gestures which a normal duck makes when swallowing precipitately. The food was digested by dissoclution, not by trituration, ‘the matter digested in the stomach being conducted by tubes, as in an animal by its bowels, into the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to be released.’ Vaucanson disclaimed any attempt to make a perfect copy of the process of digestion, although he doubted whether the anatomists would feel that anything was left to be desired in the construction of the wings, ‘which had been imitated bone by bone’. Since his intention was to demonstrate, rather that simply to exhibit a machine, the internal mechanisms were fully exposed to view, though some ladies preferred to see them decently covered.

Cultural impact

The Shitting Duck of Frane was unveiled by its creator, Jacques de Vaucanson, as the first automaton able to metabolise food and digest it, expelling waste just as a mortal duck, in the spring of 1739. During The Enlightenment, a time of mechanisation of labour, the idea that human beings could be replaced by these enigmatic, never-tiring aberrations of nature created a cultural revolution. These mechanisations of seventeenth-century France probably inspired the illustrious duck of the master toy-maker, Jacques de Vaucanson, which won the heart and admiration of the whole of Europe.

Vaucanson’s Shitting Duck followed the principles of Descartes’s mechanistic universe, and bolstered the Enlightenment-era belief that animals were just meat machines, but automatons nonetheless. The ability to create life no longer was the domain of god and of living organisms, but was now captive in the hands of man’s genius. These ideas terrified and excited many people, but was one of the major ideological changes from a natural to a mechanistic world view.

Vaucanson quickly capitalised on the commercial success of his first android, modelled after a recent sculpture by Antoiine Coysevox then in the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries, with the launch of a shepherd who played the tabor and pipe. The most acclaimed member of Vaucanson’s trinity of entertaining equipment, however, was the notorious eating, digesting, and defecating duck. Whereas the rustic flutist inhaled, exhaled, and dexterously moved his fingers over a musical instrument, this barnyard variant of Phil’s and Hero’s bejewelled birds eagerly swallowed kernels of grain to excrete them in the metamorphosed shape of pellets. Unfortunately, this amazing transformation proved fraudulent. The delicate droppings were not the natural result of simulated peristalsis but of a secondary device triggering the sphincter where a masticated plop lay hidden.

Influence on later works

Much has been written about Vaucanson’s automata. Goethe mentions them in his diary 'Tag und Jahreshefte', and Achim von Arnim, in his Journey to Naples, Sicily, Malta, and Sarfinia , that describes the duck which he was able to see when it was exhibited at Milan. Sir David Brewster, writing in 1868, describes the duck as ‘perhaps the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever made’. Vaucanson himself stated that he wished 'to represent the viscera, and to simulate the functions of eating, drinking, and digesting'.

Modern presence

Article by the director of the Museum of automatons settled in Grenoble, France. A replica of Vaucanson's mechanical duck, created by Frédéric Vidoni , is part of the numerous works of art exhibited in this museum.