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It was engineers such as de Caus who, by generalizing the concept of a moving mechanism, made the clockwork universe and the mechanical man possible.

If animals are machines and nothing but machines, then for Cartesians it must follow that the human body, which is evidently similar to the body of an ape, works like a machine, and Cartesian doctors were eager to study human anatomy as an example not of a geared mechanical system but of a hydraulic system of the sort that powered de Caus’s fountains and player organs.

Descartes does not think of the universe as being like a clock because in his view outer space is filled not with the crystal spheres of Ptolemaic astronomy, nor with the gears and levers of de Caus’s machines, but with liquid vortices which carry the planets in their orbits around the stars.

One of de Caus’s machines, however, has a sophisticated feedback mechanism.

This principle was employed by della Porta in 1606, and in 1625 Salomon de Caus devised a steam fountain.