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A figure representing a child of two years of age, seated on a stool, and writing at a desk. This figure dips its pen in the ink, shakes out what is superfluous, and writes distinctly and correctly whatever the company think proper to dictate, without any person's touching it. It places the initial letters with propriety, and leaves a suitable space between the words it writes. When it has finished a line it passes on to the next, always observing the proper distance between the lines: while it writes, its eyes are fixed on its work, but as soon as it has finished a letter or a word, it casts a look at the copy, seeming to imitate it.

FIGURE 6.3. Bridges'sMicrocosm. E.Davies, Succinct descriz description ofthe Microcosm (Glasgow: by R. and A. Foulis, for E. Davies, 1765), frontispiece. Courtesy of the British Library.

Another android drew pictures ("the various motions of the eyes, arms, and hand imitate nature exactly").56An ex apprentice of theJacquet-Droz named Maillardet subsequently built a career in London on machines that seemed to act with "life and reason." According to David Brewster they were "very common" there a generation later, when Charles Babbage certainly witnessed them. To announce such a creature, Brewster opined -thinking of the most notorious of all, the chess-playingTurk-was tantamount to projecting "a mechanical counsellor of state."57

That automata and androids exerted such a fascination is now rather well known. But the Microcosm gave solid form to the challenge that they presented to accounts of creative authorship in particular. Could it really be claimed that this machine represented a nullity of intellectual labor, sentiment, ideas, or "doctrine" when compared to Thomson's Seasons? Had it demanded less investment of time, work, and money? And were the ideas embedded in it themselves products of mechanical systemssystems of sensation, vibration, and association that human knowledge depended on? It seemed evident that the constructor of any decent orrery, let alone such a wondrous device, must have "a clear Conception of the Planetary System" before actually making the device. Nor could it plausibly be claimed that it was made only for an immediate, utilitarian function. On the contrary, visitors were publicly encouraged to come back and see the Microcosm a second time to learn from it. "The End of the Inventor is not fuller obtained in the first individual Machine," therefore, "than the End of the Author in the first individual Book." For Donaldson's side, the Microcosm was the evident proof they needed that inventing involved "ingenuity of the mind." Without exclusivity, it might be that even a machine as prodigious as this could be copied by a crafty imitator relatively quickly, perhaps even quickly enough to invalidate a patent. Surely, if no natural right existed for this, then no literary work should qualify for one either.58

The Microcosm might seem to destroy any idea of a radical qualitative distinction between authorship and invention. And indeed, it is hard to find anyone explicitly sustaining that distinction in its case. But by the same token it provided alert critics with a new line of defense against the conclusion that literary propertywas nugatory. The question became not the nature of original authorship, but the nature of copying. A machine this complex posed the question of what, exactly, the act of copying-of pirating- actually was. After all, a copy of the microcosm could never be exactly the same as the original. Material always differed to some extent in a reproduction. So did workmanship. In a world that was still largely artisanal, the variations between individual workers' skills and customs mattered. As Blackstone put it, "a Duplicate of a mechanic Engine is, at best, but a Resemblance of the other." But with a book it was different. And in trying to articulate how it was different, Blackstone broached what would become a major axiom of copyright. The "Identity" of a literary work,