The Jaquet-Droz writer android, at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Museum of Art and History) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

1774

JAQUET-DROZ AUTOMATA

“They might have been huge marionettes,” writes novelist Jean Lorrain (1845–1906), “or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic—for I divined that some plague . . . had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love . . . obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata.”

Such eerie thoughts of lifelike automata remind us of our long fascination with robot-like beings and of a particular set of eighteenth-century automata that might serve as examples of early ancestors of computers, given the complexity and programmability of these androids. Created by watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790) between 1768 and 1774, these three automata—the boy writer android (made from approximately 6,000 parts), the female musician (2,500 parts), and the child draughtsman (2,000 parts)—drew large crowds of admirers. The boy android dipped his writing quill in ink and could be programmed with a series of cams to write messages of up to forty characters in length. He periodically re-inked the pen, and his eyes followed his words as he wrote.

The musician automaton played an organ by actually pressing the keys with her fingers. She seemed to come alive, making natural body and head motions and following her fingers with her eyes. She was designed to continue “breathing” before and after her performances, and her body heaved with seeming emotion in time with the music. The draughtsman could sketch four different figures: a dog, a portrait of Louis XV, cupid driving a chariot, and a royal couple.

These automata are notable in that their mechanisms reside inside their bodies (and not, for example, in a nearby piece of furniture), making the programmability, miniaturization, and haunting lifelike quality all the more impressive. Jaquet-Droz was helped by his son Henri-Louis and mechanic (and adopted son) Jean-Frédéric Leschot, and he is said to have later constructed two artificial hands for a man with congenital deformities. The hands were clothed in white gloves and were reportedly versatile enough to enable the user to write and draw.