Nathanael dances with her repeatedly, awed by her perfect rhythm, and eventually tells her of his passion for her, to which Olimpia replies only "Ah, ah!".
Her stiffness of movement and coldness of touch appear strange to many of the company. Nathanael is invited, and becomes enraptured by Olimpia, who plays the harpsichord, sings and dances. Spallanzani gives a grand party at which it is reported that his daughter will be presented in public for the first time. I say "might be" because her conversational contributions are quite limited. Hoffmann's 1816 short story Der Sandmann ( The Sandman). The earliest conversing automaton might be Olimpia in E.T.A. There are many early documented automata doing things like playing music, and plenty of enlightenment philosophizing about what human abilities might or might not be clockwork-like, so I would have thought that there would be plenty of fictional conversing automata over the past four or five hundred years.īut apparently not: it's possible that the first real example was as late as 1907 or even 1938. I'm ruling out magical creations like golems and divine statuary brazen heads seem to have either been magical or created using arcane secrets of alchemy I don't know enough to evaluate the legend of King Mu and Yen Shih's automaton, whose conversational abilities are not clearly described in the texts I've found. An article I'm writing led me to wonder when the idea of a conversing automaton first arose, or at least was first published.
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