My biggest surprise in reading Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock is that the 17th and 18th centuries apparently somewhat were awash with automata. It’s vaguely like reading a history from a parallel world. I’ve read any number of books on various topics that cover some portion or another of the same period, some of which I’d have expected to make at least a passing reference to such a fact, but other than now and then encountering reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechnical Turk I’ve simply never heard of this.