Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring

Hans Bullman, a padlock-maker of Nuremberg, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, made figures of men and women which promenaded backward and forward, beat drums, and played upon the lute. The motive power in this case was known to be clockwork. In the volume of “Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences,” of 1729, we find an account of a most extraordinary piece of mechanism invented by one Père Truchet, made solely for the amusement of Louis XIV. when a child. It consisted of a number of moving pictures, representing an opera in five acts, which the little figures enacted--of course, in pantomime. Camus constructed with the same object a small carriage, drawn by two horses, which contained a little lady, with her coachman driving, and a footman and page holding on behind. When placed upon the floor of the table, the horses galloped along, and the coachman smacked his whip in quite a professional manner. When the carriage stopped, the page got down, opened the door, the lady stepped out, and with a curtsey bowed and presented a petition to the young king. She again bowed, entered the carriage, the page mounted, the coachman flogged his horses, the carriage glided on, while the footman ran behind, and at last jumped upon the box.