A History of Robotics: John Dee's Beetle

10/26/2025

I last made an entry in my "History of Robotics" series in 2014, a few of my personal favorites include Leonardo Da Vinci's Mechanical Knight and Yan Shi the Artificer. One can only imagine what it might have been like to work with the various tools and materials in one of these early and ancient workshops. The notion of building theses mechanical creations and automatons certainly brings to mind a sense of wonder and enchantment. With those in mind, I though a fitting entry to add to this series this Halloween season might be the beetle built by John Dee. Dee is an interesting historical figure surrounded in a decent amount of mysterious lore.

John Dee (1527 - 1608) served for a period of time as the advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a mathematician, astronomer, and general polymath who's studies ranged from navigation and geometry to astrology and mysticism (including several attempts in which he attempted to establish communication with angels. Among his many recorded ventures, early biographical accounts suggest that Dee constructed a small mechanical scarab or flying beetle during his time at Cambridge. The device was said to have been created for a stage production of a play, possibly Aristophanes' Pax (Peace), sometime in the mid-1540s. During the performance, the beetle appeared to fly across the stage, astonishing the audience.

The earliest written reference to this device appears in Anthony à Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (1691), where it is mentioned that Dee "made a flying scarabeus, which did fly into the playhouse to the wonder of the spectators". The same account, repeated by later antiquarians such as Elias Ashmole and Thomas Fuller, describes how the performance led to Dee being accused of sorcery, a suspicion that would haunt his reputation for the rest of his life. Despite his protests that the beetle was purely mechanical, it was seen as evidence of unnatural power.

Modern historians, such as Frances A. Yates in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), suggest that Dee's beetle demonstrates the early Renaissance fascination with mechanical illusion. The "flying scarab" may have used hidden wires, counterweights, or clockwork; all of which being technologies that would have been known to an engineer of Dee's training. While no physical remnants of the device survive, its description places it among the earliest recorded examples of a European automaton capable of mimicking life in motion.

In many ways, Dee's creation anticipates the later work of 19th-century illusionists such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, whose clockwork automatons and mechanical birds astonished European audiences three centuries later. Houdin, often regarded as the father of modern stage magic, blended engineering with theatrical storytelling, much as Dee had done centuries before. Both individuals understood that the boundary between mechanism and miracle is often one of perspective: what appears to be sorcery from the seats is, up close, a triumph of invention.

References and Further Reading

"Mathematics, navigation and empire", https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/royal-history/curatorial-library-archive/mathematics-navigation-empire-reassessing-john.
Wood, Anthony à. Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford. London: Thomas Bennet, 1691.
Ashmole, Elias. Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. London: J. Grismond for Nathaniel Brooke, 1652.
Yates, Frances A. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Harkness, Deborah E. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.