Today, we try to build machines that work like animals.. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey was born in 1830, and he trained in medicine and physiology. For the first ten years of his career, Marey focused on instrumentation. He measured the circulation and hydraulics of blood and breath, the elasticity, strength, and tone of muscle, the behavior of the heart. To do all this, he built a stunning variety of mechanical instruments.