Inspired by the Martin Scorsese film Hugo, an obsessive Lego enthusiast built a programmable machine that writes messages and draws pictures. All you have to do is turn a crank. Andrew Carol, who ...

This is Legonardo, an automaton capable of drawing portraits. Obviously, it doesn’t have the complex clockwork used by automatons of old, like its Swiss counterpart made by Pierre Jacquet-Droz and ...

The Martin Scorsese film Hugo did something fantastic: it gave life to a machine. The automaton featured in the film mirrored technology that really existed in the 18th and 19th century–a time when ...