TWO

The Harpsichord-Playing Android; or, Clock-Making in Switzerland

The harpsichord-playing woman automaton came into being in an unusually productive and well-developed artisan environment. The Jaquet-Droz family was well established in La Chaux-de-Fonds and had connections, talent, education, and opportunities. Histories often explain their success in automaton-building either through the individual ingenuity of father and son and their teachers or through their interest in simulating life and promoting a mechanistic worldview.1 I complement these histories by foregrounding the broader economic and cultural conditions that were operating in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, and on the European continent in the eighteenth century and that had considerable impact on the family’s ambitions and opportunities. I use these conditions to explain how and why father and son Jaquet-Droz built the harpsichord-playing woman automaton and what the automaton’s purpose and status were in their lives. I argue that the automaton was a product much more of culture, politics, and economics than it was of epistemology or natural philosophy.

In this chapter I take a journey to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small, rural village in western Switzerland that housed clock-makers, local dignitaries, natural philosophers, and patrons. The village’s social makeup provided a range of opportunities for Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz. I start with Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s youth and university studies and then explore his beginning career as a young clock-maker, integrating this with larger features of Europe’s early industrialization in the eighteenth century. I trace the channels through which he was introduced to the European court society as a young man and investigate how he and his son designed and built their android automata in the early 1770s. I also inquire into the activities of the Jaquet-Droz family during the late 1770s and 1780s, after they finished their work on androids, to uncover their self-understanding as artisans, artists, businessmen, and citizens. The specific place they accorded their automata among their various business enterprises is far from obvious, especially since soon after father and son finished their automata, the androids practically disappeared from their lives and the two artisans returned to their core clock-making trade, founding firms for the international selling of timepieces.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the Jaquet-Droz automata’s significance in the general cultural landscape of the European Enlightenment, as well as their effect on contemporary spectators. Among these discussions one finds assumptions of the kind I discussed in chapter 1: that the Jaquet-Droz automata embodied the key principles and practices of the “Age of Reason,” that they captured people’s imagination and made them think about the mechanical constitution of the human body and soul, and that the automata were part of a widely shared excitement about mechanical androids that was characteristic of the eighteenth century as a whole. The documents known to us about the Jaquet-Droz automata do not consistently support these assumptions. In the second part of this chapter, I look at such documents, as well as at how the automata were staged and how observers commented on them from 1774 into the 1790s. I discuss manuscript and printed texts about the Jaquet-Droz automata and draw conclusions that differentiate the kinds of interest that the automata provoked in their time among audiences and the general public.

My findings break down into three parts. First, individuals who saw the automata and wrote about them in letters or diaries were less interested in the automata’s mechanical sophistication or their significance as mechanical replicas of human bodies than they were in social aspects of the automata’s exhibitions, such as networking with the Jaquet-Droz family and with influential people who were in the audience. Second, all descriptions of the three automata that were printed in periodicals, calendars, and newspapers between 1774 and 1791 were transcriptions of an original text written by father and son Jaquet-Droz and printed in a brochure that was presumably handed out during automaton exhibitions. Descriptions of the automata in these print media are therefore practically identical to each other, and they do not tell us about individual people’s experiences of the automata or reactions of groups of people during automaton showings. Third, longer and more detailed texts written by editors of travelogues or calendars, among them Johann Bernoulli and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, about the Jaquet-Droz family’s life and their three automata were also copied from the original brochure that father and son Jaquet-Droz wrote. These texts are, on the whole, more specific and more deliberate, but the automaton descriptions within them are, nevertheless, not individually authored texts that could give us insight into people’s responses to the androids. The texts give us insight, instead, into economic and cultural conditions of mass print media at the time. The authors who wrote longer texts on the Jaquet-Droz family did engage some aspects of Swiss clock-making and industry, but the texts show no interest in the automata’s unusual mechanical sophistication or metaphysical implications of the ways in which they blur the boundary between humans and machines.

At the end of chapter 3, I merge the conclusions that I draw in this current chapter with analogous findings presented in that chapter on the making of, and commentary on, David Roentgen’s harpsichord-playing automaton, joining them into a larger commentary on automata, the artisan industry, and automaton commentary.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Youth and University Studies

Pierre Jaquet-Droz, born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, was the descendant of an old and established family in the Neuchâtel mountains. The profession of Pierre’s father, Abram Jaquet-Droz, cannot be established with certainty. Although a family tree that Pierre put together just before his death records that his grandfather was a justice and his great-grandfather a councillor of the honorable community in Le Locle (a neighboring village), it does not mention his father’s profession.2 Abram Jaquet-Droz married Madelaine Droz, daughter of Daniel Droz, from an estate called Sur le Pont near La Chaux-de-Fonds. Through this marriage, Sur le Pont (which consisted of two houses) passed into his possession and later into his son Pierre’s.³ It is likely that Abram cultivated the land that came with the estate, and the local economy at the time makes it plausible to assume that he was also a clock-maker: being an horloger-paysan (a peasant clock-maker) was a common occupation in the Neuchâtel mountains at the time. The dynamics of early industrialization in Switzerland entailed that traditional, agricultural means of subsistence coexisted with industrial, modern ways of production, to their mutual benefit.⁴ This economy was to have a profound impact on Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s life as well.

Pierre spent his childhood and the first part of his life as a young artisan on the Sur le Pont estate. Unlike many other clock-makers in the area, he received a substantial education in his youth, first in his native village school and by the local pastor, then at the faculty of philosophy at the University of Basel.⁵ His education was meant to prepare him for university studies in theology and for a future occupation in the clergy. This choice of profession was not unusual at the time for the son of a well-to-do family. Clerical professions provided one of only two possibilities for upward mobility for nonaristocratic and nonpatrician social groups, since the only university subjects available to them were theology and medicine.⁶ There is no documentation of the actual course of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s studies at the University of Basel, but matriculation records show “Pierre Droz” as a student for the year 1738, when he was age seventeen.7 His studies there lasted about two years.⁸

A key question about Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s university education is whether, during his stay at the University of Basel, he encountered Johann Bernoulli I and Daniel Bernoulli I, who were both professors there at the time.⁹ No sources are available to tell us about this, but speculation is relevant because it shapes our understanding of whether Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automaton work was a product of contemporary scientific and natural philosophical culture or of local, traditional artisan culture, or of both in a proportion to be weighed. An important factor that speaks for a connection between Pierre and the Bernoullis is obviously the exceptional ingenuity and intimate familiarity with physical and mechanical principles that his mechanical work discloses. It set Pierre Jaquet-Droz apart from other small-town clock-makers of his time. We also know that the Bernoullis were involved with automaton work in the first half of the eighteenth century: Basel municipal authorities asked them in several cases between 1709 and 1743 to conduct investigations of self-moving mechanical spectacles owned by itinerant lecturers and artisan journeymen who had asked permission to present their work at Basel marketplaces and fairgrounds. Such permits were usually issued or denied after expert investigation.¹⁰

It is likely that Pierre Jaquet-Droz received at least basic training in natural philosophy while at the University of Basel and that education played both social and intellectual roles later in his life, because the circles in which he moved as an adult included local natural philosophers, pastors, political dignitaries, and other educated men. However, biographers’ speculations on connections between the Bernoullis and Pierre Jaquet-Droz often go rather far and conceive of them in rather narrow terms: they range from the claim that Pierre Jaquet-Droz learned “the scientific method” for his mechanical constructions from the Bernoullis to assumptions that Pierre Jaquet-Droz was Daniel Bernoulli’s “assistant in the years 1738 and 1739.”11 Some accounts tend to convey the impression that his presumed association with the Bernoullis was the main factor to explain his and his son’s ability to build their automata. Against the background of the life that Pierre Jaquet-Droz led in the forty years following his university education, which I am laying out in this chapter, the influence of the Bernoullis fades. His immersion in clock-making and court worlds proves to have as much influence as his education in natural philosophy.

In 1740, at age nineteen, Pierre Jaquet-Droz left the University of Basel and matriculated at the faculty of theology of the Académie de Neuchâtel as a candidate for a clergy position in the Calvinist Church.¹² That same year, he also spent considerable time at his parental home in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He ended up never taking a position as a clergyman and probably never even engaged in the training.¹³ As he spent time at his home, he must have decided to get involved in the local clock-making culture and lay the grounds for his future occupation as a clock-maker and automaton mechanic.¹⁴

Jaquet-Droz immersed himself in the distinctive and thriving clock-making culture of his hometown, La Chaux-de-Fonds. He became an apprentice and then, by the late 1750s, a distinguished clock-maker with a specialization in so-called Neuchâtel pendulum clocks (pendulerie neuchateloise)—medium-size clocks that were characterized by their precision, artistic ornamentation, and combination of time-keeping with other functions such as mechanical play and mechanical music. Over those twenty years, he received training, financial support, patronage, and even a royal pension, primarily from resources in his local environment in the Neuchâtel mountains. Some historians, as I have said, put great emphasis on the Bernoullis’ influence on Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s life and work. Their stories offer an appealing narrative in which a clockmaker from rural Switzerland received scientific training and mentor-ship from members of a distinguished eighteenth-century family of natural philosophers, and they enable us to understand Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata as products of a “modern” scientific-philosophical environment and as epistemic tools in the scientific enterprise to understand, and simulate, the world.15 The Bernoullis may have helped him approach his clock-making with ideas and principles from natural philosophy that many other clock-makers did not have access to. But in his youth and early adulthood, he relied on a complex compound of resources that he received primarily from his hometown.

Clock-Making in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Early Eighteenth Century

By the time the young Pierre Jaquet-Droz returned from Basel University, clock-making was well established in the Neuchâtel mountains, with diverse modes of production in La Chaux-de-Fonds and neighboring villages. Already at the end of the seventeenth century, clock industries had started to develop on the basis of existing artisan activity. The Neuchâtelian clock and watch industry was likely preceded by the making of iron and wooden clocks; and while at the end of the Middle Ages the area had not been a prosperous place (lacking infrastructure and important cities), one or two centuries later such conditions were present. Land reforms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries helped advance agricultural activity, and industries such as mills, mines, brickworks, and forges developed near rivers and streams. By the end of the seventeenth century, the mining and iron industries went into decline, but they had given rise to other industries in the vicinity, such as toolmaking shops and foundries.16 The emergence of clock-making in the area is inseparably bound up with preexisting artisanship that dealt with metal, wood, and mill-building, specifically that of locksmiths, goldsmiths, and the makers of municipal clock towers. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such artisans dealt with both large and small equipment and were probably in charge of repair and maintenance of any machinery in the village. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, they started making iron clocks small enough for well-off people to keep in their private houses. Clock-making was subsequently transplanted from village to village and valley to valley in the area, as clock-makers traveled and trained apprentices who themselves migrated away from and then again back to the La Chaux-de-Fonds area.¹⁷

Protoindustrialism in Post-Reformation Europe

Larger factors operating in early modern Switzerland, such as the Reformation and the earliest stages of industrialization, contributed to the emergence of Neuchâtel clock-making. The figureheads of the Swiss Reformation, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, had founded in the sixteenth century a religious and ultimately political movement that had profoundly revised the role of Christianity in the world of labor and money and had formulated new principles of economic thinking, social order, and ethics.¹⁸ The Reformation’s influence was amplified through the convergence of political and religious power in the leading Swiss centers at the time, especially in Geneva, located just south of the Neuchâtel mountains. In Geneva, John Calvin had created a model Protestant state under a theocratic constitution, and under his rule Geneva had developed from a “small, undistinguished town in rural Savoy” into an “international center of religious, cultural, and financial pre-eminence.”¹⁹ From the 1540s onward, Geneva’s influence extended to the entire western part of Switzerland, including La Chaux-de-Fonds and its surrounding villages, affecting in particular economic conditions of mechanical and trade crafts such as clock-making, goldsmithing, textile-making, and printing.

The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation also precipitated enormous migration. While Switzerland was in general an attractive refuge for persecuted Protestants, Geneva, as a Francophone metropolis and a site of the Reformation, was particularly appealing for French Calvinists (Huguenots) many of whom were skilled and well-connected artisans. Continuously over a period of more than two centuries, Geneva thus attracted a considerable proportion of an economically active and innovative stratum of persecuted people. The immigrants brought with them not only skill and initiative but also commercial expertise, capital, knowledge of international markets, and reliable trade and credit relations. They reactivated crafts and trades such as the silk and cotton trade, introduced clock-making in Geneva, and initiated early capitalist habits in production and trade that were outside of the strictly regulated medieval guilds, such as the putting-out system and home industry. Protestant immigrants and their resourcefulness are also credited with having prepared the general grounds for industrial production in Europe, by promoting ways of organizing labor and material that were conducive to such production.20

The historical transformations described by the term Industrial Revolution, and the economic systems preceding the Industrial Revolution, are two additional backdrops for the production of my two women automata.²¹ Industrial Revolution connotes, in its broadest definition, the changes, often taking several hundred years, from a rural, handicraft- and agriculture-based economy to an urban, machine-driven, industrial manufacturing economy. The term Industrial Revolution has been criticized for its inherent teleological assumptions and its connotations of radical and sudden overturn, in the light of historical studies that reveal widespread overlap of traditional and modern modes of subsistence and production in Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries.22 Franklin Mendels coined the term protoindustrialization in 1974 as an alternative historical term for the emergence of the dynamic socioeconomic systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inside and outside of Britain; he suggested that this term better described the transformations in the organization of labor, capital, and materials that preceded industrialization, and made it possible.²³ Such transformations changed the balance of labor supply and local subsistence, enabled the accumulation of capital, and led to agricultural surpluses. In the 1980s, Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin joined efforts to broaden historians’ perspectives on Europe’s industrialization. They suggested investigating “artisanal, flexible alternatives to mass production” that were widespread in the decades and centuries preceding industrialization.²⁴ The discussion on the status and impact of guild regulation in the economy of early modern Europe is also ongoing. Among the points of debate are the guilds’ influence on general economic development, the pattern of their decline, and the ways in which our twentieth- and twenty-first-century understanding of industry and modernity continuously shapes our interpretations of the history of technology.²⁵

In regard to the history of my two women automata, it is important to understand preindustrial economic processes outside of the paradigm of the Industrial Revolution: there is no other way to explain the prosperous artisan contexts in Switzerland and the Rhineland in which they came into being. The economic invigoration and diversification that was occurring in preindustrial, post-Calvinist Geneva in the course of Huguenot artisan immigration influenced conditions in the Neuchâtel mountains profoundly over the two centuries following the Reformation. Clock-making was first introduced into the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century, developed into a hybrid between guild-type restricted production and laissez-faire, outputting-type protoindustrial production, and spread from there northward to the Neuchâtel mountains.26 Here as well, the immigrants brought with them a variety of tools and techniques, and they encountered the already existing industries and crafts in rural villages such as La Chaux-de-Fonds that I described above.²⁷

The clock and watch industries in the Neuchâtel mountains had originated and developed outside of the medieval guild rules to begin with. The situation in the countryside was in general more diverse than in towns, and rural economies tended to profit more from pre- and protoindustrial changes in labor and capital, since they were less influenced by guild regulation. The actual influence of guild regulation varied widely at the time in French-speaking Switzerland. Early modern Switzerland was also not a centralized monarchy but a confederation of sovereign city-states and peasant republics. There was, therefore, no centralized or mercantilized economic policy. And while some of the Swiss towns in the eastern, German-speaking part adopted methods and policies from contemporary mercantilist and physiocratic theory, there was an economically liberal spirit operating in the principality of Neuchâtel and its mountains.²⁸

The history of Pierre Jaquet-Droz intersected with key changes ongoing in Switzerland and Europe during the period “before” the Industrial Revolution. His success relied on factors such as his skill, social networks, and class status, as well as the modes of production around him. They contributed to the unusual productivity in his workshop that made possible the construction of his automata. He was not part of an industrial revolution; rather, he worked in the midst of manifold change in production and consumption in a period that preceded the steam engine and the factory.

Economic transformation in the Neuchâtel mountains was also driven by climate conditions. In Swiss mountainous areas with a high level of rainfall, such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s hometown, the main agricultural activity was stock-breeding, which was less labor-intensive than farmland cultivation. Small-scale farmers and farm laborers, as well as their wives and children, therefore turned to industrial occupations, in particular mechanical homework and clock-making, to supplement their livelihood. In more arable farming areas in Switzerland, there was much less production of such commodities by rural industries.29 By the end of the eighteenth century, Switzerland had become one of the most industrialized places on the European continent, despite accounts in contemporary travel reports that continued to portray the country as rural and idyllic, firmly rooted in the structures of a traditional agricultural society.³⁰ Switzerland held a special place in the European imagination; its starkly contrasting scenes of pastoral beauty and protoindustrial activity dramatized the relationship between tradition and modernity. These contrasts also characterized the Neuchâtel mountain region in which Pierre Jaquet-Droz found the resources and incentives to build android automata.

The Local Economy in La Chaux-de-Fonds

Between 1720 and 1790, Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s first craft as a young artisan—pendulum-making—grew into its most productive period. La Chaux-de-Fonds remained its center until about 1810 and made the trade famous abroad. Numerous other mechanical industries clustered around pendulum-making, featuring a range of crafts, corporations, working conditions, and methods of dividing labor.31

Many of La Chaux-de-Fonds’s families were involved in the town’s emergence as a center of clock-making. They tended to be related to one another through intermarriage, professional cooperation, credit agreements, or local political office. They had a great deal of influence in Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s life, and he became part of their network after he returned from Basel University. The first generation of pendulum masters and their families (named Brandt-dit-Grieurin and Ducommun-dit-Boudry) established themselves in the seventeenth century; Pierre Jaquet-Droz became a member of the second generation through friendship and intermarriage.³² These families distinguished themselves through technical innovation in clock-making, for example, but also through advanced commercial activities such as developing business relations abroad. It is plausible to believe that they taught Pierre Jaquet-Droz such practices.³³ A particularly distinguished man was Josué Robert, a master clock-maker, counsel, deputy judge, and chair of charity organizations. He essentially founded the industry of making pendulum clocks in La Chaux-de-Fonds.³⁴

There were close family and economic relations between the Roberts and the Jaquet-Droz households: Pierre Jaquet-Droz was close to Josué Robert’s two sons David and Louis-Benjamin (David married Pierre’s sister) and may have had some type of informal master-apprentice relationship with Robert.³⁵ In 1750 Pierre Jaquet-Droz married the daughter of Abraham-Louis Sandoz-Gendre, a local cabinet and pendulum merchant who provided Pierre Jaquet-Droz with cases for his pendulum clocks. The Brandt-dit-Gruérin, Robert, Jaquet-Droz, and Sandoz families formed a robust network based on friendship, familial relations, and professional cooperation.36 Throughout his career Pierre benefited from this reservoir of experience, skill, and social and cultural capital.

Around 1750, twelve years after Pierre Jaquet-Droz returned from university, more than 120 clock-makers (masters and companions) were practicing their craft in La Chaux-de-Fonds.³⁷ They constituted, by a wide margin, the majority of the artisans in the area. In comparison, there were only four foundry workers and nine goldsmiths. The clock-makers distinguished themselves not only in the production of precious and ornate artifacts, but also in innovations in the technical modules of clock and watch mechanisms. Even though in many historical accounts father and son Jaquet-Droz eclipse almost all of their distinguished contemporaries, their success was inseparable from the intellectual fecundity of this environment. The artisans and artists in the Neuchâtel mountains formed an economically and socially tight-knit group, and they borrowed from each other’s assets and art. It is difficult to meaningfully isolate any individual achievement within these two generations of artisans.³⁸

Although pendulum clock–making was blossoming economically and culturally in the Neuchâtel mountains at this time, it was not a systematically or institutionally taught craft.³⁹ The first theoretical works on the art of clock-making started appearing in the late seventeenth century, mostly in London and Paris, the European clock-making centers, and the pace of publication picked up momentum around the 1740s. These works were typically textbooks for the systematic study and practice of clock-making and clock repair. Antoine Thiout’s treatise from 1741 stands out, because it summarized most of the works known at the time. It provided critical service to both pendulum clock–makers and watchmakers and was widely read in the Neuchâtel mountains. It remained the most important reference work until Le Paute’s and Berthoud’s were published in the next generation.40 In general, however, clock-making was taught and practiced differently in the Neuchâtel mountains than in the European metropolises; it also had different goals and sought different market segments.⁴¹

It is important to also mention in this context a popular legend about the origins of clock-making in the Neuchâtel mountains, one that explains the industry’s beginnings in quite a different way. The legend tells of a late-1670s encounter between a traveling English horse trader named Peter, who had a watch that needed repair, and a young locksmith named Daniel JeanRichard from Bressel, a small village a few kilometers from Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds. JeanRichard was born around 1665 and must have been a young teenager at the time of this encounter.⁴² He had probably been exposed to mechanical artifacts earlier in his life, but this might have been his first opportunity to see, handle, and examine a watch. He managed to get the watch working again, and this success is said to have sparked his subsequent occupation of clock-making. Six months later, he finished his first watch.⁴³ His work attracted the attention of his community, and they entrusted him with repairing their watches. A few years later, Daniel JeanRichard started pursuing clock-making in nearby La Sagne, at the age of fifteen, and after 1700 he established himself in Le Locle. There, he trained many apprentices, among them his three sons, and the industry thus began to flourish in the Neuchâtel mountains.

In many histories of Swiss clock-making, this encounter between Daniel JeanRichard and the Englishman is taken to be the origin of clock-making and watchmaking in the Neuchâtel mountains.44 The eminent historian of Neuchâtel clock-making Alfred Chapuis commented extensively on this matter in 1917. Against the background of his comprehensive and thorough historical research, on which I have relied throughout this chapter, it is unsurprising that, while conceding that JeanRichard was a talented and active artisan, Chapuis finds that other clock-making families initiated the trade. He holds that Neuchâtel clock-making has older and more diverse roots than are often imagined in twentieth-century accounts.⁴⁵ The problems here are similar to the ones I encountered in the historiography of automaton-making: there is substantial decontextualization and dehistoricization, as well as a cultivation of narratives that center around individual mechanically minded figures and pay little attention to social context.⁴⁶

An interesting complementary interpretation of the legend surrounding Daniel JeanRichard has been given by the economic historian Albert Hauser, who assumes that JeanRichard’s decisive contribution to Neuchâtel clock-making was that he initiated and pursued the division of labor in the clock-making industry.⁴⁷ JeanRichard purchased components of clocks from Geneva and other places and hired apprentices to assemble the clocks. He also used machinery to cut cogwheels, as clock-makers in Geneva did, and thus initiated methods to standardize production and introduce interchangeable parts.⁴⁸ His workshop was a model for many others, although his did not expand a great deal and was soon surpassed by others. JeanRichard probably used the protoindustry of lace-making as a model and applied the home and outputting production methods of that industry to the needs of the up-and-coming clock-making industry.49 Hauser’s argument interprets the legendary founding of Daniel JeanRichard’s business as part of the existing, extensive network of clock-making outwork industry in the Neuchâtel mountains.

The consequences of the new production methods made themselves manifest in the social history of clock-maker villages such as La Chaux-de-Fonds. Entrepreneurial activity in rural areas often grew out of former agricultural activity, and new milieus and classes were emerging in those areas, with specific expertise and skills and new forms of social mobility. They differed from other rural social groups in their ambitions and self-understanding, as well as in their position vis-à-vis the sociopolitical strata of the Holy Roman Empire and the late ancien régime. The result was rural communities that resembled small-town bourgeois culture much more than traditional rural, agricultural societies.⁵⁰ Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s life and work overlapped with these social changes, as his hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds integrated clock-making artisanship, capitalist commercial methods, and cultural and intellectual elites. The changes in the modes of production and social stratification in Switzerland from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century are surprisingly absent in the literature on the Jaquet-Droz family and their automata.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Life and Work as a Young Artisan

Pierre Jaquet-Droz immersed himself in La Chaux-de-Fonds’s distinct economy—prolific clock-making industry in combination with agriculture—in the period between his university studies at Basel and his matriculation at the faculty of theology of the Académie de Neuchâtel around 1740. It is during this time that he must have given up his career as a clergyman.51 He spent most of the years between 1740 and 1747 on the Sur le Pont estate. He might have been a clock-maker apprentice then, and his first master might have been Josué Robert, or an employee of Josué Robert’s who lived on Sur le Pont.⁵² However, rather little is known about his apprenticeship.⁵³

As Pierre Jaquet-Droz was coming of age in this period, he became part of a tightly-knit group connected through professional and family relations. Many of La Chaux-de-Fonds’s cultural, political, and intellectual elite were regular guests at Sur le Pont, including merchants, clock-makers, artisans, natural philosophers, natural historians, and physicians.⁵⁴ Among the most influential were the Gagnebin brothers, Abraham and Daniel, who were about fifteen years older than Pierre Jaquet-Droz and were well-educated, well-connected physicians and natural philosophers who corresponded with prominent philosophers such as Albrecht von Haller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They were supportive companions to Pierre Jaquet-Droz.⁵⁵

During the years of his apprenticeship, Pierre Jaquet-Droz produced a variety of mechanical objects, including music boxes, heavily ornamented watches, and pendulum clocks, which were becoming increasingly fashionable in the mid-eighteenth century.⁵⁶ His work soon became more complex, attracting attention and drawing people to La Chaux-de-Fonds. He became more ambitious and started to travel more and expand his professional horizon. Between the later 1740s and the mid-1750s, he traveled regularly to Paris, the European clock-making center, to visit cabinetmakers and other artisans and to purchase cases for his clocks.57 He was also in correspondence with Ferdinand Berthoud, a famous clock-maker and the author of the most influential clock-making textbook of the time; in May 1753 Berthoud wrote a long letter to Jaquet-Droz. It is possible that one of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s visits to Paris was on Berthoud’s invitation, and it is likely that they met.⁵⁸

During this period, in 1750, Pierre Jaquet-Droz married Marie-Anne Sandoz, the daughter of the local merchant Abraham-Louis Sandoz-Gendre. Sandoz-Gendre was an ambitious citizen and a key influence on Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his professional decisions. It was Sandoz-Gendre who initiated and planned Jaquet-Droz’s crucial visit to the Spanish court in the late 1750s, and he also accompanied his son-in-law on this trip. Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his wife founded a household on the Sur le Pont estate, but soon the house became too small, and the family and workshop moved to a larger dwelling, closer to the center of La Chaux-de-Fonds.⁵⁹ The couple’s first child, daughter Julie, was born in 1751, son Henri-Louis in 1752, and finally another daughter, Charlotte, in 1755. Marie-Anne never recovered from giving birth to her last child, and she died in December of 1755. The child, Charlotte, died soon after, in February 1756.⁶⁰

In this same period, influential people started to notice Pierre and his work. Milord Maréchal, also known as Lord Keith, the governor (the representative of the Prussian king) of the principality of Neuchâtel at the time, became interested in Jaquet-Droz’s elaborate and unusual mechanical works; he was another key figure in this decisive period in Jaquet-Droz’s life. Lord Keith was a descendant of an aristocratic Scottish family and a gifted and extremely well-connected man. After leaving Scotland in the 1710s, he went first to Spain and then to Switzerland. When Jaquet-Droz and his work were introduced to him, he advised Jaquet-Droz to make people outside of Switzerland aware of his clocks.61 Lord Keith suggested going to Spain—where he still had influential contacts—to exhibit clocks and to present them at the court of King Ferdinand VI, a well-educated monarch who promoted arts and mechanics.⁶²

The encounter with Lord Keith was fortunate for Jaquet-Droz, since even though he had built a series of fancy and innovative objects and had received admiration and respect for them, he still needed to sell his works and make them known to larger circles—not easy to do in the rural area where he lived. Even the better-off families had difficulty affording the luxurious commodities that he produced. Pierre Jaquet-Droz had to look abroad for potential buyers.⁶³

Journey to the Spanish Court

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s journey to Spain was a considerable effort, given both the delicacy of the mechanical objects he was transporting and the ambitious project of meeting the Spanish king and queen at court. His father-in-law, Abraham-Louis Sandoz-Gendre, set up the itinerary for the journey and saw to the travel arrangements. Jaquet-Droz organized local contacts and letters of introduction to the Spanish king. Madrid was not a completely unknown place for Neuchâtelians: both Josué Robert and Jaquet-Droz had business relations there, as they had sold pendulum clocks to Madrid residents before. There were also other Neuchâtelians residing in Madrid at the time, with whom Pierre Jaquet-Droz came to have regular interactions.⁶⁴

In April 1758 Jaquet-Droz, his father-in-law, and a worker named Jacques Gevril embarked on their journey, carrying with them a specially constructed container designed for the transport of six extremely delicate pendulum clocks. Arriving in Madrid after forty-nine days of travel, they were welcomed in the house of Sieur Jacinto Jovert, a friend of Lord Keith’s. Because of King Ferdinand’s ill health, Jaquet-Droz had to wait five months before he was received; he spent this period moving in the Neuchâtelian circles in Madrid, making his name known there as well as—through the grapevine—back in Switzerland.65

In September 1758 Pierre Jaquet-Droz finally gained an audience with the king to present his pendulum clocks and mechanical works. The king allegedly made him play them more than one hundred times. Among the objects he displayed were a clock with a striking mechanism and a flute that featured a cage containing a singing bird that moved its wings. Another was a pendulum clock that was designed as a mechanical bell-striker; its figure responded to inquiries about numbers from the audience by beating on a drum (the clock was called Le nègre). The mechanism that seemingly could “understand” and respond to inquiries about numbers worked by means of magnets. Another pendulum clock was called The Stork (La cigogne), probably part of a mechanical water or fountain arrangement. The Stork was apparently very amusing to see, as the ambassadors of Portugal, Denmark, and Holland each demanded one for their own lords. The most sophisticated clock was called The Shepherd (Le berger). It was a pendulum clock that featured a shepherd sitting on top playing his flute. This clock reportedly reaped the most success and remains today in the royal palace in Madrid.⁶⁶

That all the pieces Pierre Jaquet-Droz displayed were sold for good prices demonstrates that his work was compatible at the time with the still-flourishing court society and its tastes and needs: he delivered machinery and props that people in high positions liked and needed for their purposes. Ornamented pendulum clocks accompanied by music were a genre that he could work within, vary, and push to its limits, well beyond the demands of mere time-keeping, to accomplish this success. He was thus learning about the uses and possibilities of spectacular machinery, music, and clock-making mastery within the context of courts, stages, and highbrow audiences during his apprenticeship and in Spain. His long stay in Madrid also meant that he could make his name known beyond the king and queen and socialize with Neuchâtelians in Madrid and their clients and peers. These factors proved crucial in the design and purpose of his three automata.

In January 1759, Jaquet-Droz and his father-in-law embarked on their journey back to the Neuchâtel mountains, where they arrived in late March. He was now a prominent and celebrated pendulum clock-maker far beyond the borders of the Neuchâtel mountains. His workshop expanded and became a flourishing business. All industry in Neuchâtel, not only the pendulum-clock industry, was boosted by Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s success, because the commissions and orders that came in after the journey to Spain also went to the workshops of his numerous competitors.67 Crucially, the trip provided the financial conditions under which he and his son could spend several years conceiving of, designing, and building three mechanical androids.⁶⁸

The Three Automata

As a young adult, Pierre Jaquet-Droz had taken into his household a young man of humble background, Jean-Frédéric Leschot. Jaquet-Droz treated Leschot like an older sibling of his son Henri-Louis, allowing the two young men to learn and live together. They were initiated into the clock-making trade together until around 1767, when fifteen-year-old Henri-Louis was sent to the university. Leschot became one of the three principals of the first Jaquet-Droz workshop and later, after the automata were built, a crucial figure in the founding of the various branches of the Jaquet-Droz main firm, the maison.⁶⁹

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s son Henri-Louis was born in 1752 and received his early education from his aunt, his maternal grandparents, his father, and the local pastor. In 1767 Pierre Jaquet-Droz sent him to Nancy to study under the abbé de Servan, a historian, engineer, and mathematician.70 Henri-Louis studied physics, mathematics, music, and drawing, and this training enabled him to bring new directions to his father’s work.⁷¹ In 1769 Henri-Louis returned to the Neuchâtel mountains, where his father and Leschot had continued building precious and sophisticated pendulum clocks. Around this time, the three men must have started working on the android automata, with Henri-Louis putting into practice the skills and expertise he had acquired in Nancy.

By early 1774, four pieces of exceptional craftsmanship were completed: an automaton theater called The Grotto (La grotte), a one-meter by two-meter animated picture, and three androids.⁷² The androids depicted a small boy who wrote texts that were programmed on a disc of wedges; another boy, who sketched four drawings programmed on a cylinder of cams; and the harpsichord-playing woman, who played five melodies, supposedly composed by Henri-Louis. The musician’s performance was programmed on a drum furnished with studs and ridges, which followed the principle of the strike mechanisms that Pierre had used for his pendulum clocks. I discuss this mechanical design in detail in chapter 4. Father and son Jaquet-Droz exhibited their mechanical masterpieces for a few months in La Chaux-de-Fonds and then took them on tour to cities in mainland Europe, to London, and finally, in the 1780s, as far as we know, to Geneva, where they had founded branches of their clock-making firm.

The Jaquet-Droz Company and Its Branches

Sometime in 1773, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz left La Chaux-de-Fonds for London to set up, together with Leschot, a branch of the Jaquet-Droz firm for production and trade. The automata must have been finished or nearly finished by then. The impetus for the London branch was international demand (mostly from the Middle East and the Far East) for automatic pendulum clocks and other exquisite mechanical objects. In founding a foreign branch, Pierre and Henri-Louis were following an established business model for eighteenth-century clock-making.73 Henri-Louis was in charge of the branch in London, living there for about two months a year and spending the rest of the year in La Chaux-de-Fonds and on the road. Pierre traveled to London and stayed with his son when his presence was needed.⁷⁴ In 1783 Henri-Louis founded a new London association, together with the clock-maker brothers Henry and Jean-Marie Maillardet, who were also originally from La Chaux-de-Fonds and may have been trained as young men in the Jaquet-Droz workshop.⁷⁵ Henri-Louis became quite notable during this time as a widely traveling businessman and a member of several distinguished societies.

In La Chaux-de-Fonds, the old production house existed until well into the 1780s with both father and son Jaquet-Droz having shares in it.⁷⁶ There is an eyewitness report of the workshop in an October 1782 diary entry, many years after the three automata were finished, by a councillor named François de Diesbach. Diesbach traveled through La Chaux-de-Fonds, was impressed with its wealth and architecture, and “before dinner,” he writes, had the chance to visit “Monsieur Jaquet-Droz,” who showed him pendulum clocks and organ clockworks. Pierre Jaquet-Droz told him that his son was in London and that the automata were in Paris.77 The automata, at that stage, were thus with neither of the two original makers, and in the 1780s Pierre Jaquet-Droz was producing clocks for foreign markets and not additional automata.

Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz was the head of all his firms, solely in charge of the artistic as well as the commercial parts.⁷⁸ He did not have a strong physical constitution, however; he suffered from tuberculosis. Production and business negotiations obliged him to make arduous journeys, and he did not respond well to the rough climate of the Neuchâtel mountains or the humid climate in London. Given his responsibilities in Paris, London, and his home country, he was constantly overworked. Pierre Jaquet-Droz found himself equally taxed, dividing his life between Paris, London, and Switzerland.⁷⁹ In 1784 Henri-Louis was no longer able to tolerate London’s climate, and he took the business that he had established there with Leschot in 1773 to Geneva. His father followed him to Geneva a few years later, after he had continued his workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds. From then on, Henri-Louis’s own production house was in Geneva as well as that of the association Jaquet-Droz & Leschot, while the one founded as Jaquet-Droz & Maillardet remained in London. In each of these centers, commodities such as watches, tobacco cases, manicure sets, and perfume bottles (with pearls, enamels, and precious stones) were designed, built, assembled, and sold, and many of these objects contained small, hidden, very sophisticated mechanisms. Also produced were clocks with musical mechanisms and astronomical instruments for scientific purposes.⁸⁰

Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Leschot settled well in Geneva, becoming members of important circles and formal associations and receiving citizenship in 1785. Genevans were interested in them not least to reinforce Geneva’s claim as the clock-making capital of Switzerland. In 1786 Henri-Louis was made a member of the prestigious Société des Arts, and he came to greatly influence Genevan clock-making, art, and industry through projects and inventions—ranging from toolmaking to urban planning—that he administered with Leschot. In reunion with Pierre, they even planned new android musicians, but there is no evidence that they ever built them.81

Looking at how the Jaquet-Droz family ran their businesses after they finished their three original android automata helps us understand the status that these objects had in their lives, as well as the artisans’ priorities and self-understanding as artists, businessmen, and citizens. The automata highlight one unarguably successful episode in their lives, but the Jaquet-Droz family’s sense of their own legacy revolved much more around other commodities and objects in their repertoire. As we have seen, in the decade or so after they completed the automata, they invested a great deal of time into founding and running business ventures that had nothing to do with automata. These endeavors took priority for both Pierre and Henri-Louis, and they followed contemporary customs and expectations of what skilled and ambitious clock-makers did.⁸² As the workload and economic risk of their business ventures increased, their interest in touring and exhibiting their automata disappeared. Indeed, the three automata were almost certainly sold, since they do not appear in any of Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s or Leschot’s accounting books, inventories, or wills.⁸³

The Jaquet-Droz business in Geneva was in its prime in the years 1786 and 1787, and it had a highly visible presence. Although its prosperity appeared to be stable, it turned out to be of short duration. A few setbacks and losses occurred in the later 1780s when customers did not pay their bills. It may have been that the firm was forced to sell the three automata in this context. In 1789 the French Revolution made matters worse. Trade with England became more complicated, and clock-making faced the challenge of modifying its heretofore luxury products for a broader stratum of clients. Because of his poor health, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz moved from Geneva to nearby Chambésy on the lake, but his respiratory problems remained. He moved on to Provence and then to Naples, but to no avail: he died on 15 November 1791, less than a year after his father’s death, leaving his associate Leschot as their only business successor. The Jaquet-Droz businesses were liquidated through the trust of Ami-Isaac Dassier, a friend of Henri-Louis’s.84 Some reports say that upon Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s death the automata were sold to Spanish impresarios.⁸⁵

In spite of the automata’s fame, it is rather difficult to keep track of their whereabouts after the 1780s. We know that, right after they were completed, father and son Jaquet-Droz exhibited them locally in La Chaux-de-Fonds for a short while, then showed them in Paris and London, and eventually took them to Geneva, where the artisans had settled. Some historians of the Jaquet-Droz family believe that until the 1870s, the automata were “on tour,” appearing on various stages in continental Europe, but there is little evidence to support this belief.⁸⁶

The Harpsichord Player’s Reception

Although the harpsichord player and the Jaquet-Droz family’s other automata did push the envelope of the mechanical arts of the time, they were not a categorically new phenomenon for contemporary audiences, or even spectacular beyond the spectacle culture of the early modern period. Texts on the Jaquet-Droz automata written during the years that the automata were on display are rather reticent about the automata themselves, their spectacular craftsmanship, and their metaphysical implications as “machine-men”—themes that took on such relevance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sources at our disposal comprise diaries and letters from La Chaux-de-Fonds locals or travelers who came through and printed reports in contemporary periodicals, almanacs, travelogues, and calendars. Citations and mentions of the Jaquet-Droz automata in such documents appeared for the twenty or so years after the automata were finished and first exhibited, after which period references began to ebb.

Manuscript and printed references to the automata give us insight into the circumstances of their exhibition, but both are often silent about the automata’s actual mechanical function and their effect as artificial humans. Writers of letters or diary entries were, instead, interested in the automaton shows as social events and in their own social relations to the Jaquet-Droz family as artisans and notables, while the printed texts were all copied or translated verbatim from a brochure that the Jaquet-Droz firm produced, probably in 1774, to be handed out at automaton shows.87 This brochure merely provided plain descriptions of the android automata and the automaton theater, and the texts copied from it thus all convey a similar impression and tell us little about people’s reactions, awe, wonder, or thoughts on the role of automata in the problem of unstable human-machine boundaries.

Observers’ Reports on the Automata

Among the first eyewitness reports of the automata is a June 1774 entry, about six sentences long, in the diary of David Sandoz, a La Chaux-de-Fonds area notable. Sandoz said that he went to La Chaux-de-Fonds and “saw the ‘curiosities’ of the Jaquet-Droz family.”⁸⁸ The particular display that Sandoz saw must have involved a combination of the automaton theater La grotte with at least two of the three androids: a whole mechanical scenery. His entry says that in one of the curiosities, “there is a man who walks to the mill with a donkey and who returns from there with a sack on the donkey, and a dog that barks.” It also features “young women who dance to the tune of a harpsichord played by a young woman of the size of a six-year-old child; she moves her head while she is playing.” Sandoz also saw “a boy who draws a portrait of King Louis XV with a black pencil, etc.” His entry closes by noting that there was “also a cow with its calf, moo tones, goats that climb a rock.”⁸⁹ Sandoz does not seem to perceive any one of the mechanical theater’s elements as foregrounded, and the two androids do not seem to have been staged at the center. His note does not display any particular excitement either about the mechanical theater or about the androids or their metaphysical implications.

Shortly afterward, in July 1774, another La Chaux-de-Fonds notable, Isaac Droz, reports in a letter to the governor of the principality of Neuchâtel that “the automata with which the Jaquet-Droz family had occupied themselves in the last few years are finished.”90 Droz’s report continues with a rather detailed paragraph about the exhibition of the Jaquet-Droz’s mechanical works. It says the automata are now accessible to the public and that the street leading to their house is occupied every day by coaches and wagons. Rain does not discourage people from coming, and showings are staged all day, starting around six in the morning and ending at seven or eight at night. Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, with two workers, take turns in presenting their automata. Isaac Droz also mentions that among those in attendance are honorable persons from neighboring areas, high-level administrators from other cantons with their ladies, and also an incognito French ambassador with other gentlemen. Droz included in his letter three drawings “drawn by these beautiful children”—which is a little imprecise, given that only one automaton was a draftsman. In fact, Droz’s letter pays little attention to the three androids or the automaton theater, not indicating exactly which pieces were on display and certainly not providing any details or any statement about the effect the display had on him. The letter seems much more focused on the crowds and the notables, which is understandable since it was written to the governor.

On 21 January 1775, about six months after David Sandoz’s diary entry and Isaac Droz’s letter, Abraham-Louis Droz, another prominent citizen of La Chaux-de-Fonds, wrote to his brother Pierre-Frédéric. The letter contains about two paragraphs on matters having to do with the Jaquet-Droz family. Droz starts out by reminding his brother that Pierre Jaquet-Droz of La Chaux-de-Fonds made a very rare and curious “piece” called La grotte or La bergerie, in which one could see many automata who played musical instruments.91 It goes on to say that, in addition, “one saw a child of two years who held a brush in his hand and drew like a skilled person of this art.” “The writing automaton,” the letter points out, “wrote everything that one dictated” without a person’s touching him “directly or indirectly.”⁹² Droz’s description of the writer automaton’s skills is interesting, since the expression “neither directly nor indirectly” is a direct quote from the brochure that the Jaquet-Droz firm printed about their three androids and the automaton theater. There is a whole history, which I tell at the end of this chapter, about how this brochure’s text eventually became copied many times in various print media in the 1770s and 1780s. It becomes apparent here, in the context of Abraham-Louis Droz’s communication, that the brochure enabled individual letter writers who had witnessed automaton showings to use the brochure’s preproduced phrasing to describe the automaton’s motions, instead of writing their own reports. This might be one of the reasons that we find so few individualized accounts of the effect that the Jaquet-Droz automata had on spectators. In Abraham-Louis Droz’s letter, too, the phrasing about an automaton’s writing what is dictated to him is almost identical to the phrasing in the brochure.⁹³ His letter also mentions, like Isaac Droz’s, the distinguished personalities who saw the automata, and he closes this paragraph by saying that “the son of said lay judge Jaquet-Droz” left for Paris “with said piece” to show it to the new king Louis XVI (crowned in 1774) and “also to go to London.”⁹⁴ In the second paragraph, Abraham-Louis tells his brother about his desire to join the Jaquet-Droz family as a clock-maker and perhaps go to London with them, as he was hoping to spend some time there practicing his profession.⁹⁵

A letter of 31 March 1776 from a Suzanne-Louise Nicolet to her brother, a pastor-in-training and tutor in Utrecht, mentions the Jaquet-Droz firm’s brochure and gives a few more insights into the automata’s whereabouts immediately after they were completed. The Nicolets were friends of the Jaquet-Droz family, and she wrote this letter a little more than a year after Abraham-Louis Droz wrote his. It is about ten sentences long and starts by saying that concerts of La Chaux-de-Fonds’s Thursday Society were discontinued “since M. Jaquet-Droz’s departure” and that he was in London with his pieces, “where he works.”96 She also tells her brother that she has tried several times to “send him the description of all their precious masterpieces which [father and son Jaquet-Droz] themselves printed.”⁹⁷ She offers to send him a sample piece written by the writing automaton and a drawing by the draftsman automaton, saying that she herself saw the automaton write what was dictated to him without anyone appearing to touch him and that one could see his eyes follow his writing. She also says she saw the “other draftsman” (this is a little imprecise) follow his work on paper with his eyes, seeming to examine it. She makes no mention of the harpsichord player, which suggests, once again, that the exhibitions did not always include all three. Her language resembles that of the brochure but not in an unusual way, as she uses common words and phrases. In November of 1776 she writes again, stating that “M. Jaquet-Droz” had not returned and probably would never return, and noting that “his father” also left a while ago in order to join him in London (“M. Jaquet-Droz” is thus always Henri-Louis here) to help him make new precious pieces.⁹⁸

Finally, the correspondence of Julie de Lespinasse contains a mention of the Jaquet-Droz automata in Paris. De Lespinasse ran a distinguished salon in Paris in the 1750s and 1760s and was famous for her passionate letters, which filled several volumes. Through her intellectual engagements she was acquainted with Diderot and d’Alembert, among others. In an undated letter, she writes, “Before dinner, I will go to rue de Cléry and see the automata which are astonishing, as they say.”⁹⁹ There is reason to assume that this letter dates from mid-February 1775.¹⁰⁰ Later in 1775, the automata went to London.¹⁰¹

Judging by these reports, there seems to have been a whole set of mechanical toys and musical devices on display when the Jaquet-Droz family showed their work, and it seems that the selection varied with individual showings. The reports also suggest that people did not become overly excited or carried away by the automata. Instead, people emphasize the important role that the stagings played as part of the social life of the Neuchâtel mountains: networking, receiving distinguished personalities, and rubbing shoulders with famous artists and artisans.

The First Printed Text about the Harpsichord Player

The Jaquet-Droz company and their harpsichord player (together with the other automata) must have left La Chaux-de-Fonds in the second half of the year 1774, since in January 1775 they were already in Paris. The androids did not return until the 1780s.102

Short, descriptive texts about the harpsichord player (and the other automata) were printed in eighteenth-century periodicals from 1774 until the early 1790s. I trace these earliest texts about the harpsichord player to understand how they were composed, copied, and integrated into other contexts in print media, thus also identifying general publishing conventions for journals, calendars, and travelogues at the time. I explore what other texts and contexts the harpsichord player was made part of, between what other reports she was “sandwiched,” and who found her or her makers important.

The first written description of the harpsichord player appeared in the brochure that the Jaquet-Droz firm produced around 1774. The document describes the performance of their automata and their automaton theater, and copies were probably given out in the towns where the automata were exhibited.¹⁰³ There is no original of the brochure extant, but transcriptions and one engraving have survived. The document first describes the writing automaton, then the draftsman, then the harpsichord player, and finally the automaton theater, each in about one paragraph.¹⁰⁴ The description of the harpsichord player states that the figure “represents a young girl between ten and twelve years old, sitting on a stool, and playing a harpsichord.” The text continues, saying that “the automaton’s body—the head, the eyes, the arms, the hands, and the fingers—conduct various movements which seem natural. The automaton herself plays on her harpsichord various melodies in two or three voices, with great precision. Since her head can move in all directions, as can the eyes, she casts her glances equally often to her hands, to the music, and to the audience; her pliable body leans forward occasionally to have a closer look at the music; her chest drops and rises alternately, in order to indicate breathing.”105 This text highlights both the harpsichord player’s music-playing and her bodily motions, and it is worthwhile to note that it weighs these two dimensions equally: it talks as much about the automaton’s moving head, eyes, and breathing as it does about the actual music-making and the melodies. The text makes clear that the automaton does “more” than just make music. The automaton’s breathing, furthermore, is singled out prominently at the end. By mentioning the functions of the bodily motions (looking at music and audience) and their effects (appearing natural and engaging to the listeners), the text evokes a whole musical-performative scene, rather than just emphasizing the mechanical reproduction of music. I return in chapter 4 to the mechanical means of this performance and its cultural correlates in eighteenth-century music-making.

Between 1775 and 1790, nine texts were published containing references to the Jaquet-Droz family and their harpsichord player. The references ranged from short remarks about Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz to longer accounts of their automaton, of clock-making, or of Switzerland’s industry and geography. These texts appeared in the weekly magazines Journal de politique et de littérature (published in Brussels) and Journal de Genève, in the pocket calendars Göttinger Taschenkalender and Almanach de Gotha, and in five travel reports authored, respectively, by a Swiss dignitary, a Swiss natural philosopher, a German professor, a British tutor, and a British clergyman. Six of these texts mention the Jaquet-Droz family or their automata briefly, while the other three provide more detailed descriptions of the harpsichord player’s performance.

It is remarkable that the descriptions of the harpsichord player in such texts are copied or translated verbatim from the Jaquet-Droz firm’s 1774 brochure and thus are practically identical to one another.106 They reflect little engagement on the part of the authors with the automaton itself. The articles share this with the references to the women automata in the letters and diaries I discussed above (and also with a letter about the dulcimer player that I discuss in chapter 3). I argued that those letters and diaries lacked careful engagement not only with the automata, their specific performance, and the superb craftsmanship that they embodied, but also with larger issues, such as metaphysical or ethical consequences that might emerge from an encounter with mechanical humans. I explained the letters’ and diaries’ indifference by suggesting that not only was automaton-making a historically specific practice, but so was the reporting of responses to automata. The responses to the harpsichord player (and the other automata) functioned within specific social networks and served social functions in a manner similar to that of other spectacles at the time.

In the case of printed responses in eighteenth-century mass media, I explain, in the following, the lack of specific engagement with the automata by considering the economic exigencies and literary conventions of the publishing markets of the time. Contemporary conventions of filling periodicals with short reprinted texts from other sources took priority over commissioning original commentary on the automaton’s epistemological, cultural, or ethical implications—commentary that later accounts lead us to believe were a part of contemporary texts on automata. At the end of this chapter, I discuss how even prominent eighteenth-century natural philosophers, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Johann Bernoulli, when they composed texts about the harpsichord player for the calendar or travel report that they edited, were content to copy the automaton’s description from elsewhere. They apparently saw no need or desire to elaborate on the automaton’s meaning or implications.

The Harpsichord Player in the Media Industry of the Eighteenth Century

The production and dissemination of texts about the harpsichord player occurred in the context of profound changes in public communication in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century: fast expansion of publishing and literacy, commercialization of literature, and newly emerging relationships between reading, sociability, and political participation affected the ways that people wrote, printed, read, and discussed texts. The new cultural and economic conditions of literary production, along with the changing roles of authors, editors, and publishers, greatly influenced the content and form of texts in periodicals, almanacs, and travelogues. Texts about automata were microcosms of this very transformation.

There was a rapid increase in the production of books, newspapers, and periodicals between 1770 and 1800. Together with this, the number of readers also increased significantly, for many reasons, including the proliferation of public libraries, reading cabinets, and reading circles and the extension of the public education system. During the last third of the eighteenth century—right at the time that the first texts about the harpsichord player were printed—the literacy rate, the number of bookstores, and the number of authors doubled.107

Reading became a foundation of newly developing social activities (much as music-making did, as I discuss in chapter 4), and it was practiced in reading circles, salons, and public libraries. It generated new foundations for, and relationships between, literature and sociability.¹⁰⁸ Periodicals played a significant role in creating this reading public; many different kinds were edited and published for different social groups. The educational and moralizing style of these periodicals was itself a product of the Enlightenment, and they in turn popularized the thoughts and principles of the Enlightenment. They created new reading groups, explored new themes and topics, and spawned a market in which writers, editors, booksellers, and tutors could make a living.¹⁰⁹

The texts about the two women automata were part of this newly emerging economy and cannot be taken in isolation as objective accounts of the dulcimer player and harpsichord player. The texts discussed in the remainder of this chapter, in fact, do not mention what their authors thought about the automata. Rather, my analysis explains how the texts about automata came into being and that automata and texts about them were the results of two different modes of production—artisan production and literary production. The texts tell us how textual worlds, intellectual worlds, and worlds of artifacts came together to make up the universe of the two women automata.

Short Mentions of the Harpsichord Player

Texts that mention the Jaquet-Droz firm or their automata were published in diverse media and were part of a variety of reading experiences. The first periodical mention of the harpsichord player appeared in the Journal de politique et de littérature in January 1775, seven months after the android’s first presentation to the public. The individual issues of this journal were divided into two parts, a political journal and a literary gazette.110 Political articles covered news from Russia, Italy, Germany, and Great Britain, and the literary gazette dealt with spectacles, natural history, and literary novelties. Curiously, the account of the harpsichord player appears in the political part of the journal.¹¹¹ A one-page account describes the Jaquet-Droz firm’s three androids and automaton theater La grotte, devoting one paragraph to the writing automaton, one to the draftsman, and a few words to the harpsichord player. The descriptions of the writing automaton and the draftsman are almost identical to those in the brochure (with occasional omissions and variations), and the one-sentence description of the harpsichord player is identical to the first sentence of the brochure description.

Two reports, from 2 and 9 February 1775, in the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des lettres en France may have been written after the same set of exhibitions in Paris.¹¹² The first mentions that “Mister Jaques Droz, a young man of 22 years of the Principality of Neuchâtel in Switzerland,” had attracted curious people in the previous few days with several automatic figures, of which one in particular “made Parisian artists despondent.”¹¹³ The report then presents a short description of the writing automaton that is copied from the original brochure by the Jaquet-Droz firm. The description of the automata ends here (with no mention of the harpsichord player), and the author proceeds to tell a story about how Jacques de Vaucanson himself assisted in the staging of the Jaquet-Droz automata. According to this report, Vaucanson was astonished at the rapid and precise execution of the writing machine, without any apparent communication with its maker. The report states that Jaquet-Droz supposedly offered to explain the mechanism, but “the academicien” refused and wanted to resolve the problem himself.114 A week later, the report of 9 February 1775 states that the Prince of Soubise (a minister of Louis XVI) introduced to the queen “the new mechanic who astonishes all of Paris.” This artist, the report says, was notified two days in advance of the honor he was to have, in which time he managed to program his draftsman to draw a portrait of the king and queen.¹¹⁵

Similar brief mentions of father and son Jaquet-Droz or their harpsichord player appeared in reports from eighteenth-century travelers to Switzerland.¹¹⁶ One example is the work of William Coxe, a well-educated English clergyman, tutor, and travel companion to noblemen and gentlemen. He toured most of the European continent in the second half of the eighteenth century and also wrote historical works, memoirs, and editions of correspondence. He published Travels in Switzerland, an edition of letters that he composed during a trip to Switzerland in 1776, shortly after the Jaquet-Droz family presented their automata in La Chaux-de-Fonds. A letter from September 1776 describes his expedition to Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds, whose economic situation he explores in detail, mentioning Pierre Jaquet-Droz briefly by saying that he was “now in Paris.” This reference to the Jaquet-Droz family only in passing is in line with other writers’ observations that were published in the months after the automata were first presented.¹¹⁷

Another example is the Voyage historique et littéraire dans la Suisse occidentale, published in 1781 by Jean-Richard Sinner de Ballaigues. Sinner was bailiff of the Erlach Castle in the canton of Bern and, from 1748 to 1776, director of the university library at Bern.118 He intended his book to be less a travel report than a series of observations on the history, geography, and arts of western Switzerland. Two chapters deal with a journey to the Neuchâtel mountains, reporting on the villages La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, the local industry, and the beginnings of clock-making in the area.¹¹⁹ Sinner mentions Pierre Jaquet-Droz, together with his automata and other machines that were “known in all of Europe.”¹²⁰

Manuals for travel in Switzerland also made mention of the Jaquet-Droz firm and their automata. One of the most widely circulated from the 1780s, by the editor and professor Christoph Meiners from Göttingen, was a handbook to help young men prepare their voyages. It was organized as a collection of letters from various Swiss locales, and several letters from September of 1788 by Meiners focused on the area around La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle.¹²¹ These letters recount in detail the area’s political and economic characteristics and report on local clock-making workshops (magasins d’horlogerie). Meiners mentions father and son Jaquet-Droz, saying they “moved away from La Chaux-de-Fonds. The son settled in Geneva which I only learnt after having left Geneva.”¹²²

Finally, among the briefer mentions, the physician Johann Gottfried Ebel, born in Silesia and a citizen of Zurich after 1801, wrote a manual for travels to Switzerland that was first published in 1790, with many editions to follow. This first proper travel guide for Switzerland, the best and most comprehensive handbook until well into the third decade of the nineteenth century, offers practical advice on how to prepare for and conduct a journey to Switzerland, including suggestions for travel, hiking routes, maps, equipment, and budget calculations. The second part of the work describes Switzerland in encyclopedic style: entries are alphabetically ordered and provide information on route-planning, sightseeing, and hostels. It is the entry on La Chaux-de-Fonds that mentions briefly the Jaquet-Droz family and their automata.123 These brief references show that the name Jaquet-Droz remained known during these decades and was closely connected with La Chaux-de-Fonds.

Longer Texts on the Harpsichord Player

Texts that offer more detail about the Jaquet-Droz firm and their mechanical works appeared in similar media (periodicals, pocket calendars, and travel reports) and in similar economies of text production, but they differed in composition and authorship. All of the detailed accounts copied the description of the harpsichord player more or less verbatim from the brochure text, without any more meaningful engagement, but they integrated that description into longer texts, framing it with other material and adding new contexts to it. For two of these texts, we can reliably identify as authors two distinguished eighteenth-century natural philosophers, Johann Bernoulli and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. I analyze these longer texts not for what they have to say about the automaton, but rather for how they integrate the prefabricated text with other contexts. From this I infer what kind of meaning these authors ascribe to the harpsichord-playing automaton. Their treatment of the harpsichord player is ultimately evasive and reticent, too, but the treatment is, in each case, part of a larger text that the authors composed and that effectively functioned as an “environment” for the descriptions of the harpsichord-playing automaton.¹²⁴

Detailed texts (in two cases, with their authors determinable) about the harpsichord player appeared in a pocket calendar, in a travel report, and in an almanac. First, the 1780 issue of the Taschenbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen (a popular pocket calendar better known as the Göttinger Taschenkalender, edited by the eminent Enlightenment natural philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg), carried a seven-page article on the Jaquet-Droz family, their hometown, and their mechanical works.¹²⁵ This was about five years after the automata were first presented. Second, natural philosopher Johann Bernoulli, in his eighteen-volume travel compendium Sammlung kurzer Reisebeschreibungen, of 1781 to 1787, translated and expanded a travel report about western Switzerland that was originally written by a Swiss man in 1764. Bernoulli devoted about twelve pages in this report to the Jaquet-Droz family and their works.126 Third, there appeared in the 1789 edition of the widely read Almanach de Gotha, a publication similar to the Göttinger Taschenkalender, a four-page description of the three automata and the automaton theater La grotte. In its original format, this almanac was published annually from 1764 to 1889.¹²⁷

Portable almanacs were among the most important and widely circulated media of the quickly growing literary market of the late eighteenth century. They bring into focus the proliferation and commercialization of literature at the time. From the mid-seventeenth century, they were increasingly carried, and their format was adapted for this purpose: they became small, handy, affordable booklets, and luxury versions were often extravagantly decorated. Publishers and booksellers created and sold specialized almanacs for music, for theater, for wine experts and smokers, for women, for children, and for the various estates and professional groups, such as officers, clergymen, doctors, actors, musicians, and book traders, but also for servants and prostitutes.¹²⁸ Almanacs were key media in popularizing the ideas and visions of the Enlightenment. They tended to have larger readerships and wider distributions than other media, and they provided cultural and intellectual hinges between the various social groups and estates of Old Europe.¹²⁹

Two historians of calendar culture, Maria Lanckorońska and Arthur Rümann, illustrate how this culture enabled and reflected the social and cultural transformations of the time. They take an eighteenth-century poem by the prominent Enlightenment poet Johann Christoph Gellert about the Old Reich’s estate society and add two lines about calendar culture.130 The original poem by Gellert describes the rules of social and political order of the estate society in early modern Germany.

Enjoy the things that God granted to you

Renounce with joy what you don’t have.

Each estate has its own peace

Each estate has its own burden.¹³¹

Lanckorońska and Rümann’s twist goes as follows:

Enjoy the things that God granted to you

Renounce with joy what you don’t have.

Each estate has its own peace

Each estate has its own burden.

And each estate was given

Its own pocket-sized book.¹³²

The Göttingen pocket calendar was published annually under slightly varying names from the early 1770s into the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was founded originally by Johann Christian Dieterich, a prominent eighteenth-century publisher, who was able to attract numerous important authors.¹³³ He first recruited J. C. P. Erxleben, professor of physics and veterinary medicine at the University of Göttingen to be the calendar’s editor. When Erxleben died in 1777, Dieterich offered the editorship to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a professor of experimental physics at the University of Göttingen and an eminent philosopher of the Enlightenment, who edited it from 1777 until his own death in 1799. In the course of Lichtenberg’s editorship, the calendar acquired enormous prominence, and it and he became in a way “one and the same entity” in the German-speaking literary landscape.¹³⁴ The calendar soon reached a circulation of eight thousand—“virtually the whole of educated Germany.”135 Lichtenberg’s salary for this position was free lodging in Dieterich’s house.¹³⁶

Lichtenberg was a leading advocate of Enlightenment principles such as education and the wide dissemination of knowledge, and his calendar was an instrument for this purpose. He divided it into three parts: an editorial (which he wrote himself every year, and some of his editorials became his most prominent texts); a section for news, novelties, and gossip; and a section for new inventions and mechanical and other peculiarities.¹³⁷ Lichtenberg himself was probably the author of at least half, and perhaps most, of the texts in the calendar.¹³⁸ He was also responsible for collecting the curiosities, the novelties, and the gossip that were so characteristic of short articles in calendars.¹³⁹ The collaboration of ambitious publishers like Dieterich with editor-philosophers like Lichtenberg to produce pedagogical and entertaining mass media was a typical Enlightenment phenomenon. It was common for an editor to be also the main contributor to and overseer of the periodical as a whole, and such “literary entrepreneurs” became increasingly influential economically and culturally in the late eighteenth century.¹⁴⁰

Lichtenberg’s article on the Jaquet-Droz family and their mechanical works in the 1780 issue of his Göttingen calendar appears under the category of inventions and physical wonders, bearing the title “P. Jaquet Droz and H. E. Jaquet Droz Father and Son.”¹⁴¹ Lichtenberg frames and introduces the work of the Jaquet-Droz family with an account of the Neuchâtel mountains in late-eighteenth-century Switzerland. He employs the cliché of Switzerland’s supposedly idyllic mountains and valleys to start off, asking the reader: “What would a widely traveled, wise man answer if you asked him: What ingenuity do you expect from a people whose winters last almost seven months, a people that knows hardly anything about the tender days of spring and autumn, and, in the remaining five months, is scorched by the sun? Would he assume to find under such a sky a clockmakers’ republic people that nature herself seems to have formed into mechanics, and altogether one of the most dexterous and industrious people in Europe?” Lichtenberg answers his rhetorical question by claiming that the wise man would have to assume thusly. He tells the reader that he is speaking of the Neuchâtel mountains between Switzerland and Burgundy, home of thousands of artists and of “the famous Berthoud” and “the two Misters Droz,” whose work he wants to discuss. These latter two, he explains, are from a village called La Chaux-de-Fonds, which contains “together with the neighboring village Le Locle 721 clockmakers, 98 goldsmiths, and 1323 lace-making women, not even counting the painters and other mechanical artisans.” Lichtenberg further illustrates the economic situation in la Chaux-de-Fonds by noting that every year “15,000 golden and silver pocket watches are made” (not counting the pendulum clocks), as well as all kinds of clock-making tools, used and “admired even by London and Paris artists.” On this note, Lichtenberg makes fun of the increasingly “globalized” world of trade and commerce in the eighteenth century, saying that “there is no doubt” that the occasional pocket watch from Le Locle and La Chaux de Fonds is kidnapped to London (“like Madeira wine to the West Indies”), in order to be offered, with a great increase in imagined value and real price, to the gallant connoisseur as a piece of precious English work. “But let us move on,” he writes, “to the works of the Jaquet-Droz family.” Lichtenberg says that “these two artists” have built complex clocks in the past, of which “the two most noteworthy” are in the possession of the king of Spain. He then quotes “unanimous testimony of the experts,” according to which father and son Jaquet-Droz built artworks that “surpass the famous works of Vaucanson.”142

After this introduction, Lichtenberg gives details of the Jaquet-Droz family’s three androids and automaton theater. He takes the text from the 1774 brochure, translates it into German, cuts out an occasional phrase, and paraphrases a few passages. Still, his text stays fairly close to the French original. The order in which details of the automaton are surveyed remains exactly the same, and Lichtenberg adds nothing to the Jaquet-Droz firm’s original brochure text.

Several characteristics of Lichtenberg’s text resonate with his calendar’s pedagogical mission; with contemporary preoccupations about natural history, anthropology, and cosmology; and with contemporary conventions of textual production. One of Lichtenberg’s goals for the calendar, ironically, was diligence and care in the selection and writing of original articles, rather than mere copying of texts from other sources, as was common practice with other contemporary calendars.143 Given the high demand for curiosities, novelties, and gossip on the part of the calendar’s audience, this care was not always possible. Lichtenberg mined contemporary popular works just as much, asked friends to help him out with texts, and sought inspiration by other means.¹⁴⁴

Although Lichtenberg was one of the leading commentators of his time on matters of anthropology and natural philosophy, his main concern in these passages is not to elaborate on the automata’s relevance to questions about the constitution of human selfhood. Introducing spectacular android automata to a relatively large audience, he prioritizes anecdotes, statistics, and a “milieu study” of Switzerland over reflections on “machine-men.” The text on the Jaquet-Droz automata is sandwiched, furthermore, between other stories about curiosities and inventions and entertaining or educational short treatises on historical and geographical topics, such as Japan, the history of the bell, the slave trade, common errors (populäre Irrtümer), religious superstition, fashion, and women’s rights in Russia. Many of these neighboring articles are copied from other sources, too.¹⁴⁵ The Taschenbuch as a whole is integrated into a calendar, which provides notations, as was common practice at the time, of meteorological and astronomical data, holidays, birthdays and genealogies of European aristocratic dynasties, engravings, and tables of common measures of length, weight, and volume.¹⁴⁶

The author of the second longer text is Johann Bernoulli III, another leading natural philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was the son of Johann II and the grandson of Johann I, who were both professors of mathematics at Basel. Johann III also published on mathematical and astronomical topics, but his most influential works were his writings on natural history (anthropology and geography) and his eighteen-volume collection of travel reports.147 For the seventeenth volume of this series, published in 1783, Bernoulli translated and expanded a travel report about western Switzerland that was written by a Swiss savant named Samuel-Frédéric Ostervald and originally published in 1764.¹⁴⁸ Bernoulli devotes two full chapters (out of a total of fourteen) to the area around La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle. The Jaquet-Droz family and their works figure in a lengthy passage covering about twelve pages. This description of the Jaquet-Droz automata is one of Bernoulli’s additions, since Ostervald’s original report was published seven years before the automata were finished.¹⁴⁹

Bernoulli uses conventions similar to Lichtenberg’s to frame the description of the Jaquet-Droz automata and also makes similar choices as to his text’s form and content. It is quite possible that Lichtenberg and Bernoulli used similar sources for material to preface their descriptions of the Jaquet-Droz automata.¹⁵⁰ Bernoulli’s text is considerably longer than Lichtenberg’s, dealing in much greater depth with the villages La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle; however, the passage on the Jaquet-Droz automata remains the same length, as it is also copied from the brochure.

Like Lichtenberg, Bernoulli starts out by describing the geographical and natural historical characteristics of the village Le Locle and presents statistics about the inhabitants’ occupations and métiers (listing 331 clock-makers, 761 lace-makers, 78 goldsmiths, and 15 hosiery-makers). He also provides the total number of watches (“not counting pendulum clocks”) made in Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds and spends considerable time and space illustrating the variety and prosperity of the village’s clock-making industry, rehearsing at length the legend about Daniel JeanRichard and the beginnings of clock-making in the area.151 Bernoulli also explains the stages and divisions of labor in the clock-making industry around La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle. When he talks about the Jaquet-Droz family and their mechanical works, he first describes several of the spectacular clocks that Pierre Jaquet-Droz built in the 1760s and also recounts Jaquet-Droz’s visit to the king of Spain. He then describes the three androids and the automaton theater. Bernoulli’s descriptions are, like Lichtenberg’s, literal and almost complete translations (with a couple of errors) of the corresponding passages in the 1774 brochure by the Jaquet-Droz family. Bernoulli’s text is slightly longer than Lichtenberg’s, because he omits fewer passages, but like Lichtenberg, Bernoulli adds no details about the automata to the brochure’s text.

The third and final longer text I examine is a three-page account of the Jaquet-Droz automata in the Almanach de Gotha, which was published about six years after Bernoulli’s 1783 travel report. The reading experience that the Gotha almanac provides is similar to that of the Göttingen calendar.¹⁵² The heading under which the automata appear is “Chefs d’oeuvre” (master works or masterpieces), a typical rubric for news in calendars. The first part of the Gotha almanac contains a calendar, a list of holidays, a long section on genealogies of European aristocratic dynasties, and geographical and astronomical data; the second part, after the calendar, collects curiosities, treatises to educate and entertain, and short stories. The text on the Jaquet-Droz automata appears in the second part and is a description with no introduction or any other explanatory context. For this reason, and because this text is one of only two French texts that I consider here (along with the previously discussed Journal de politique, whose content was identical to that of the brochure), it is interesting to compare its details to the original in the brochure, since a period of fifteen years elapsed between their respective composition.

The account of the harpsichord player in the Almanach de Gotha amounts to a close paraphrase of the text in the 1774 brochure. The syntax is slightly altered, and on many occasions synonyms are used. The almanac, for example, uses the French word “sein,” rather than the brochure’s “gorge,” when describing the motions of the harpsichord player’s chest.153 Another example is the peculiar wording for the instrument the harpsichord player is playing. While the 1774 brochure uses the phrase clavessin organisé, the text in the Gotha almanac changes this to clavecin organique.¹⁵⁴ But for the most part, the order in which the three automata are presented and the sequence of details about each automaton within the individual paragraphs remain exactly the same. To see how similar the two texts are, we can compare the first sentences of the paragraph that describes the harpsichord player. The 1774 brochure says:

La troisième figure représente une jeune fille de 10 à 12 ans, assise sur un tabouret et qui touche un clavessin organisé. Cette automate, dont le corps, la tête, les yeux, les bras, les mains, et les doigts ont divers mouvement qui paraissent naturels, exécute elle-même sur son clavessin divers airs de musique en deux ou trois parties, avec beaucoup de précision.

The Almanach de Gotha, fifteen years and a great deal of transcribing and reprinting later, says:

La 3eme pièce représente une fille de 12 ans assise sur un tabouret devant un clavecin organique. Cette musicienne automate imite on ne peut plus naturellement les mouvemens du corps, des yeux, des bras & des doigts, d’une personne qui joue; & touche sur le clavecin plusieurs pièces de musique à deux & à trois parties, avec toute l’exactitude imaginable.

Descriptions of the Jaquet-Droz harpsichord-playing automaton were printed in a variety of media and written by a variety of authors for a variety of purposes over a period of one and a half decades. It is remarkable that, over this range of time, space, and function, they were so consistently and faithfully copied from one another. We can safely assume that none of the texts’ authors saw the automata in action; their accounts are not individual and deliberate accounts of impressions and do not engage the relevance of androids to the relationship between humans and machines. Rather, the texts’ form and content, and their similarity, are rooted in the contemporary literature-producing machinery of which both the texts and the media were products. The compilation and composition of the texts followed this machinery’s conventions, and the texts’ function has as much to do with this machinery as with the documentation of the staging of android spectacles.155

The texts that I selected here more or less exhaust one of the most authoritative bibliographies on the Jaquet-Droz automata, in Faessler, Guye, and Droz’s Pierre Jaquet-Droz et son temps, and I even included some texts here that were overlooked there. It is, of course, not clear how many other accounts were produced in the 1770s to 1790s. Another wave of interest, and thus of publications, occurred in the later nineteenth century (see my chapter 6). As far as the two and a half decades after the harpsichord player’s production are concerned, however, accounts like the ones presented here are the most typical.¹⁵⁶

Conclusion

My findings regarding printed texts about the harpsichord-playing automaton, taken together with the eyewitness reports, suggest that there was no unambiguous, collective excitement about this automaton—or other automata—in the eighteenth century that would transcend social boundaries and constitute a mass phenomenon comparable to the mass phenomena in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And yet, the persistent idea that the automata of the eighteenth century were widely known and appreciated has served important roles in narrating the history of automata and artificial humans and the history of industrial modernity. Ideas of this kind deploy the eighteenth century to suggest parallels between the Enlightenment and the culture of artificial humans of the twentieth century, assuming that we can understand our own relationship nowadays to artificial humans (and to technology in general) by reference to the “Age of Reason.” Among the most significant problems with this idea is that the kind of “publics” that were emerging in the eighteenth century were not mass societies of the kind that have, since the late nineteenth century, so profoundly shaped our own current societies.

Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz were “clockmaker-peasants” (horloger-paysans) who received unusual education, who were fortunate enough to be introduced into the contemporary court culture of spectacle, and whose commodities fit well into the economic landscape of protoindustrialism and overseas trade. Those are my main explanatory parameters to understand why and how they built the harpsichord-playing android automaton. I followed references to the harpsichord player through a variety of texts and traced the contours of her travels, meanings, and functions. Spectators’ reports that I found in letters and diaries did not suggest pronounced interest in the automaton’s performance. The texts’ casual and reticent nature reflected, rather, the social function of the showing of spectacles at the time. Mentions of and commentary on the harpsichord player were often mediated through other texts and followed unexpected routes. These texts were products of specific writing industries and practices that shaped and constituted their form and content. Thus they are not documents of, or windows into, responses from a generally conceived “public” to the automata. I find a similar situation in the history of texts on the dulcimer player in chapter 3. The relationship between eighteenth-century automata and contemporary reactions is a complex compound of histories of artisan-ship and of reading and writing texts. Our own twenty-first-century understanding of automata in the Enlightenment and the human-machine boundary operates, not least of all, on key assumptions that stem from the texts about automata between 1780 and 1810.