Barbarossa: Early Robotic Experimentation by a Renegade Anthropologist

Barbarossa: Early Robotic Experimentation by a Renegade Anthropologist. The Institute for the Scientific Study of Human and Non-Human Phenomena. 16 March [2025?]. Posted at "3:13 PM. As of March 2025, on line here.[1]

Submitted by the key initial compiler of the Clockworks 2 "Graphic & Plastic Arts" secction and/but until it proves otherwise, we will classify this entry as a spoof. It is primarily of interest for what purports to be an image from ca. 1909 or a long-haired and bearded (steampunk, humanoid) robot, and his creator (see link above), image titled, in Dutch De machinemens 'Barbarosa' met zijn schepper."

From the headnote above the image (cleaned up):

A remarkable machine created in 1909 by the poet, tinkerer, and renegade Anthroposophist Zylmar Zygmunt Amador-Fleché, head of our branch in Amsterdam and regarded (unfairly) by local devil-worshippers as a quack. Barbarossa could count, sing, dance (gauchely), eat, and excrete. Satanism, quite popular in fin-de-siecle Amsterdam, had at least three hundred adherents in the neighborhood of our office, a tri-story walkup on Rigalistrasse; on a lark, a thirteen-man cell of them invaded our office in a sweltering June of 1911 and absconded with a kicking and shrieking Barbarossa, threatening to sodomize the dwarf that they declared must be within.

[* * *]

While Amador-Fleché departed the Earthly coil decades later whilst defending the Maginot Line, Barbarossa still stands in our Amsterdam office’s foyer, startling visitors with nursery rhymes in Occitan and Romansh. Another lost annal in the early history of robotics.

As of March 2025, a longer version of the story can be found on the web, under "1909 – OCCULTUS / BARBAROSSA – WHITMAN (GERMAN), / Posted on September 27, 2009 by cyberne1 on the Cyberneticzoo.com website, "a history of cybernetic animals and early robots," here.[2]

RDE, with thanks to Chad D, finishing 22Mar25