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We tend to think of robots as creations of the late 20th century,

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but 18th century watchmakers were creating sophisticated machines long before the advent of computers and algorithms.

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Nick Glass traveled to Philadelphia to see one.

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In a darkened room in a museum in Philadelphia, a machine with an astounding memory,

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a clockwork mechanical boy who can write and draw,

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an automaton from the Greek word automatus, meaning self-moving.

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It does three poems and four pictures.

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Charles Penniman is 85.

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He first saw the mechanical boy when he was six or seven.

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My father lifted me up so I could look inside the box

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and that was very exciting to see how these wheels and gears were producing a picture.

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The instructions, the memory are all in the so-called cams,

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a series of brass discs, each individually filed down and serrated.

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There is one cam to make the pen go up and down,

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another cam to make it go from side to side, and another cam group to make it go forward or backward.

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There are 72 cams altogether to make the whole thing work.

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The automaton arrived at the Franklin Institute in 1928 in pieces.

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They didn't find out who made it until they got it working again.

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"Ecrit par L'Automate de Maillardet" -- "written by Maillardet's Automaton."

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That's Henri Maillardet, a Swiss clockmaker based in London in the 1790s.

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These automata are from the so-called golden age, a half century from 1860 to 1910.

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Plaster heads, eyelashes of human hair and mohair, eyeballs of blown glass, teeth of real ivory.

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A chef gets sozzled on white wine as he prepares to cook the cat.

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Automata like the peasant and the pig have a dozen or more different animations.

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The mechanism is at the back, the clockwork spring in a drum on the left,

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the cams with the memory for each animation on the right,

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all up and under the peasant's tailcoat.

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His shoulders shake with laughter. His foot stamps with the fun of it all.

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And for the umpteenth time, the salivating pig is denied the black truffle in his other hand.

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You've known him for over 80 years. Have your feelings changed?

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Yes, indeed they have. The longer I know him, the more respect I have for the mysteries of how he works.

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How?

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Maillardet managed to get the information that makes ships and poems and so forth reduced to brass cams.

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With the advent of cinema, the fashion for automata came to an end.

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But they still have the power to astonish and delight us, adults and children alike.