Chapter 35 7.1 The first artificial self in ancient Greece

Like most inventions, the invention of automatic control can be traced back to ancient China.On a dusty plain, a small wooden figure in a robe stood on a short post, his body staggering.The pillars stood between a pair of turning wheels, drawn by two red horses in bronze harnesses. Dressed in a flowing ninth-century Chinese robe, the figure points away with one hand.When the carriage galloped across the prairie, the gears connecting the two wooden wheels creaked; under the magical effect of these gears, the little wooden figure on the post always pointed firmly and accurately to the south.When the carriage turns left or right, the wheels with linkage gears make reverse corrections according to the change to counteract the movement of the carriage, ensuring that the arm of the wooden dummy always points south.With a firm will, the wooden man pursues the south automatically and never tires.It guides the king and ensures that the whole team will not get lost in the wilderness of ancient China.

The inventive geniuses of medieval China were really quick-witted!Farmers living in the Huishui River in Southwest China wanted to control the amount of alcohol they drank while feasting around the stove, so they invented a small device to control their restless desire for alcohol through its self-regulation.Zhou Qufei of the Song Dynasty described this kind of drinking straw in his travel notes of Yunyou Xidong.The straw is made of bamboo and is about an inch and a half long. You can control the amount of alcohol you drink, and each cow can enjoy a small sip.A silver "little fish" floats in it, and the drinker may be too drunk to drink, then the metal fish in the straw will automatically sink, restricting the warm flow of plum wine, and announcing the end of his carnival night; If the drinker sips too hard, he won't get anything, because the buoy will rise with the help of suction and block the straw.Only by taking a slow, steady sip can you enjoy the pleasure of alcohol.

However, after careful consideration, neither the guide car nor the drinking straw is a truly automatic (that is, self-control) device in the modern sense.These two devices just tell their human owners in the most subtle and cryptic way that adjustments are required to maintain the original behavioral state, and things like changing the direction of travel or the strength of the lungs are left to humans. .In the terms of modern thinking, humans are part of the circuit.To be truly automatic, the wooden man pointing south should change the direction of the car himself so that it becomes the guide car.At least it has a carrot hanging from the tip of its finger, teasing the horse (now that the horse is in the loop) to follow along.Likewise, a wine straw should be able to regulate the flow of wine on its own, no matter how hard one sucks.However, although it is not automatic, the compass car uses a differential gear. This is the ancestor of the modern car's transmission more than a thousand years ago. An early prototype of the aiming gun.In this sense, these ingenious contraptions are really some wonderful miscarriages on the automation lineage.In fact, the first truly automatic devices appeared a thousand years earlier than that.

Ctesibius was a barber living in Alexandria in the middle of the third century BC.He is obsessed with mechanics and has a talent for it.He eventually became a machine craftsman under Ptolemy II, making artificial objects in earnest.He is said to have invented the pump, the water-pressure-controlled organ, several types of ballista, and the legendary water clock.At the time, Ctesibius' reputation as an inventor rivaled that of the legendary engineer Archimedes.Today, Ctesibius is credited as the inventor of the first truly automatic device. At that time, Ctesibius' clock was very accurate because it could regulate the water supply by itself.Before that, the weakness of most water clocks was that the water reservoir that pushed the entire drive mechanism would gradually slow down as the water reservoir emptied (because the less water and shallower it is, the less water pressure), Therefore, the speed of the clock is also slowed down.Ktesibius invented a regulating valve to solve this long-standing problem.Inside the regulator valve is a conical float with the tip poking up into a matching, inverted funnel.Water comes out of the funnel stem in the regulator valve, over the float, and into the cup where the float floats.At this time, the float will float up and enter the inverted funnel to narrow the water channel, thereby restricting the flow of water.When the water dwindles, the float sinks again, reopening the channel and allowing more water to flow in.In other words, the regulating valve finds the right spot in real time to let "just enough" water through to keep the flow in the metering valve's container constant.

The regulating valve of Ctesibius is the first non-living object ever to self-regulate, self-manage, and self-control.In this sense, it becomes the first ego born outside the realm of biology.This is a truly automatic object - generated and controlled from within.And the reason we now see it as the granddaddy of automatons is that it allowed machines to breathe like living things for the first time. And the reason why we say it does have a self is because of what it displaces.A continuous, self-regulating stream of water was converted into a constantly self-regulating clock, so that the king no longer needed servants to tend the water clock's tank.In this sense, the "automatic self" crowds out the human self.For the first time in history, automation has taken over human work.

Ctesibius' invention was a close relative of the all-American device of the twentieth century—the flush toilet.The reader can see that Ctesibius' float valve is actually the ancestor of the float ball in the upper tank of the ceramic toilet.After flushing, the float sinks as the water level drops and uses its metal arms to pull open the water valve.The water put in fills the tank again, successfully lifting the float so that its metal arm cuts off the flow when the water level reaches exactly the "full" point.From the perspective of the Middle Ages, this toilet ensures that it has enough water by automatically rising and falling.In this way, we see the prototype of all autonomous mechanical creations in the tank of the toilet.

About a century later, Helen, who also lived in Alexandria, figured out many different kinds of self-buoyancy devices.To the modern eye, the installations resemble a series of severely sinuous toilet utensils.In fact, they are smart drink dividers for parties.For example, the "dirty goblet", which can continuously refill itself through a tube at the bottom, keeping the wine in the glass at a constant level.Helen wrote a huge encyclopedic work - "Pneumatic Dynamics" - which was full of his various inventions.Those inventions seem incredible even by today's standards.The book was widely translated and reproduced throughout the ancient world, with immeasurable influence.In fact, in the next two thousand years (that is to say, the mechanical age that lasted until the eighteenth century), there was not a feedback system that did not have Helen's invention as the originator.

There is one special case, which was conceived by a Dutchman named Cornelis Drebel in the 17th century.The man is an alchemist, lens grinder, pyromaniac and submarine freak (he has built more than one submarine that can dive below 1600 meters!).It was Drebel who invented the thermostat when he was trying to refine gold by various means.This thermostat is another example of a feedback system that affects the world.As an alchemist, Drebel suspected that the reason why the lead in the laboratory could not be turned into gold might be because the temperature of the heat source heating the element fluctuated too much.So in the 1720s, he cobbled together a miniature furnace that could heat alchemical raw materials for long periods of time, just as the gilded stones that defined Hades were burned and melted deep in the earth.Drebel attached a glass test tube the size of a pen to the side of the small stove, filled with alcohol.When heated, the liquid expands, pushing mercury into a second test tube connected to it, which in turn pushes a brake lever that closes the tuyere of the furnace.Apparently, the hotter the stove, the longer the vents are shut, and the smaller the fire.The cooled tube retracts the brake lever, which opens the tuyere and allows the fire to grow.An ordinary household thermostat used in the country works for the same reason as Drebel's device—the purpose is to maintain a constant temperature.Unfortunately, Drebel's automatic furnace did not produce gold, and Drebel never revealed the design to the world, and his automatic invention disappeared without a trace without any impact.More than a hundred years later, a French squire rediscovered his design and made a thermostat for incubating eggs.

James Watt, the man who bears the title of inventor of the steam engine, was not so lucky.In fact, efficiently functioning steam engines were working decades before Watt was able to see them.The young engineer Watt was once asked to fix a small early Newcomen steam engine that was not working properly.Dismayed by the poor steam engine, Watt set about improving it.Around the time of the American Revolution, he added two things to the steam engine of the day, one improved and the other revolutionary.His key improving innovation was the separation of the heating chamber from the cooling chamber, which made his steam engine extremely powerful.Such a powerful effect required him to add a speed regulator to moderate this newly unleashed mechanical force.As usual, Watt turned to technologies that already existed.Thomas Meade was both a machine builder and a miller.He once invented a clumsy centrifugal regulator for mills that only lowered the millstone onto the grain when it was moving fast enough.It regulates the output power of the stone mill, not the power of the millstone.

Watt figured out a radical improvement.He took Meade's mill regulator and improved it into a pure control loop.With this new regulator, his steam engine cut itself at the throat of its own power.His thoroughly modern regulator.It can automatically stabilize a motor that has become quite violent at a certain constant speed selected by the operator.By adjusting the governor, Watt can change the speed of the steam engine at will.This brings about a revolution. Like Helen's float and Dreybel's thermostat, Watt's centrifugal governor is equally transparent in its feedback.Two shot puts are respectively installed on the two ends of a rigid pendulum and hung on a post.As the column spins, the balls spin too, and the faster the system spins, the higher they fly.The scissor-cross linkage with the rotating pendulum jacks up the sliding sleeve on the column, actuating a valve, a valve that controls the speed of rotation by regulating the steam.The higher the ball spins, the more valves these linkages close, reducing the spin rate until a certain spin rate (and height of the spinning ball) is reached at an equilibrium point.This control is as reliable as physics itself.

Rotation is actually an unfamiliar force in nature.To a machine, though, it's blood.In biology, the only known bearing exists at the junction of the sperm's turning flagellar propeller.In fact, apart from this tiny motor, all things with genes will not have such things as shafts and wheels.However, for those machines without genes, the rotating wheels and rotating bearings are the reason for their existence.What Watt gave these machines was the kind of recipe that would allow them to gain control over their own revolution, which was precisely Watt's revolution.His invention spread widely and quickly.It is precisely because of his invention that factories in the industrial age can use steam as power, and the engine can self-regulate in a regular manner, and it is precisely this kind of omnipotent self-control that is used: Watt’s flying ball regulation device.Self-supplied steam power gave birth to machine factories, which produced new types of engines, which gave birth to new types of machine tools.They all have self-regulating devices that power the snowballing law of advantage accumulation.Every visible worker in the factory is surrounded by thousands of invisible control devices.Today, there may be thousands of hidden adjustment devices working simultaneously in a modern factory.And their working partner may be only one person. Watt took the volcanic power of steam as it expanded, and tamed it with information.His fly-ball controller is an original information control, one of the first non-biological control circuits.The difference between a car and an exploding gas can is that the car's message—that is, its design—tames the brutal energy of gasoline.A burning car in a riot has as much energy and substance as a speeding car in the Indy 500.The racing car's systems are controlled by a critical mass of information, taming the fire-breathing dragon.With a little self-awareness, all the heat and wildness of fire can be tamed into docility.People tamed the raging energy and brought it out of the wild to serve me in their backyards, basements, kitchens, and even living rooms. Without the main control circuit formed by the regulator that is rotating peacefully, the steam engine is simply an unimaginable device.Without that ego as its little heart, it would blow up right in front of its creator.The huge energy released by the steam engine not only replaced slaves, but also triggered the Industrial Revolution.But in an instant, a more important revolution followed quietly.The Industrial Revolution wouldn't be a revolution if it wasn't accompanied by an information revolution (albeit hard to detect) caused by automated feedback systems that spread rapidly.If a fire-powered machine like a Watt steam engine lacks a self-control system, then all the labor liberated by this machine will be bound to take care of the fuel.So it is the information, not the coal, that makes the power of the machine useful to take whatever it wants. Therefore, the industrial revolution is not a primitive incubation platform for preparing for a more complex and sophisticated information revolution.On the contrary, automatic horsepower itself was the first stage of the intellectual revolution.It was crude steam engines, not tiny chips, that dragged the world into the information age.