More than 200 years later, the Jaquet Droz manufactory from La Chaux-de-Fonds, the district center of the canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, has resumed the production of "automatons", large mechanical dolls named after the watchmakers of the Droz family. But let's remember how it all began.
Meet the Writer, an automatic watch movement that was created back in the 1770s by the famous Swiss watchmaker, Pierre Jaquet-Droz. The created mechanism was intended to record words and sentences up to 40 characters.
Despite such a serious age, the mechanism works fine to this day, shocking everyone with its complexity.
Imagine what it means to create a mechanical machine that can write in 1770? This great event was ahead of its time. In addition, we cannot even imagine how long it took the creators of this mechanism, how much patience and resourcefulness was put in to achieve the desired result.
Pierre Jaquet Droz, a famous watchmaker and mechanic, was born in 1721 on a small farm Sur-le-Pont, located in the vicinity of the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds. He laid the foundation for one of the most prestigious trade marks and became a skilled creator of animated clocks with singing birds and fountains, musical clocks, as well as automatic mechanisms - automatons.
From 1738 to 1747 Pierre Jaquet Droz was engaged in watch mechanics. He made a number of grandfather clocks with highly sophisticated movements that surpassed in their characteristics all then existing analogues. Then, Pierre Jaquet Droz began to build music playback modules into his watch mechanisms.
Promotional video:
And once, Pierre Jacquet Droz met Milord Marechal, the governor of the Principality of Neuchâtel, who advised him to show his mechanical masterpieces abroad and, in particular, in Spain, where Milord could help him arrange a meeting with the king.
Enlisting his support, Pierre Jaquet Droz, together with his father-in-law and a young worker, Jacques Gevril, made a special wagon, which housed six pendulum clocks, and in 1758 went to Spain. Pierre Jacquet Droz was allowed to show his creations to King Ferdinand VI of Spain. This presentation was a real triumph for the master - the monarch and the courtiers were amazed by the clock, which was ticking off the time automatically, without any outside interference.
A few days later, the master received 2,000 golden pistols: all the watches he brought were purchased at once for the royal palaces of Madrid and Villaviciosa …
This was an impressive sum, thanks to which Pierre Jaquet Droz, upon his return to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1759, was able to devote himself entirely to the manufacture of pocket and table clocks, as well as the creation of the famous automatons. In his work he was assisted by his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot, a neighbor's son.
Since 1773, the family business of Jacquet Droz and Leshaux has been producing more and more sophisticated automatons. The highest degree of skill was achieved with the manufacture of three automaton dolls: Caligraphus, Artist and Musician.
Pierre-Jacques Droz made the first automatic doll in 1773. The android was called "Writing Boy" and was a doll the size of a five-year-old sitting at a table. The body of the "automaton" was made of wood, the head was made of porcelain; it took the watchmaker 20 months to make. The clockwork boy wrote phrases with a quill pen on a blank sheet of paper (something like "I love you, my city" or "Pierre-Jacques Droz is my inventor"), blotted the paperweight with ink, looked thoughtfully at what he had written, and then threw away the piece and started writing again. Dro staged the premiere of The Boy in Paris in 1774 - at the court of Louis XVI, who had just ascended the throne, the "living" doll caused a stir.
After "The Boy" Dro, together with his son Henri, made two more dolls - "Drawer" and "Musician". The Draftsman was almost no different from The Writing Boy. He also sat at a wooden desk, dressed in a red jacket, trousers, and a white shirt with a frill. However, the "Draftsman" did not write phrases, but drew a dog with a pencil on paper and signed his drawing - "My Tutu" ("Mon Toutou"; the dog Tutu was the favorite of the previous French king, Louis XV).
The "Musician" was a more complex clockwork figure; three watchmakers had already worked on it - father and son Dro, as well as Frederic Lescho. "Musician" was larger than "Boy" and "Drawer" - the size of an eight-year-old child. The “musician” was dressed in a crinoline with a bodice decorated with bows. The "musical" woman sat at a very real, only very tiny, harpsichord and could perform five musical compositions on it - there were notes in front of the "musician".
Their presentation took place at La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1774.
Chamber technology is present in the Writer's mechanism. The cams of the toy play an important role in the mechanism, because they control not only the strokes of the pen, but also the level of pressure on the paper.
Another amazing feature of the mechanism is that the Writer is able to follow with his eyes the words he reproduces. The complexity of this mechanism is incredible.
The movement consists of about 6,000 parts, each of which is handmade, miniature and adapted to fit into a toy body. Thanks to technology. Used by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, the mechanism does not require an external power source to function. The mechanism itself generates the necessary force for operation.
These three real masterpieces, which attracted all connoisseurs of fine mechanics, confirmed the reputation of Pierre Jacquet Droz and became the guarantor of the prosperity of his company. Such a resounding success finally convinced Jacquet Droz of the need to present his masterpieces to the whole world. From La Chaux-de-Fonds the automatons went to Geneva, then, in 1775, to Paris, where they were demonstrated to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. After that, humanoid dolls visited all the main royal courts of Europe, including London, Holland, Flanders (1780-1781) and northern France.
The caligraph automaton provides the most vivid idea of the level of Swiss craftsmen. Pierre Jaquet-Droz began its creation in 1768, while simultaneously conducting research in the field of animation mechanics and imitation of the movement of living beings by technical means. Jean-Frédéric Leschaux and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz, who later made some modifications, took part in the work on the automaton. The caligraph automaton, about 70 cm high, represents a boy sitting on a stool at a mahogany table. Its mechanism, consisting of 4 thousand (!) Parts, is the most complex of the three mentioned humanoid automata.
The automaton can be programmed to write any text of 40 characters in three lines. With his right hand, "Caligraph" dips a quill pen into an inkwell, turns his eyes in the direction of the pen, shakes his head and begins to write text on a sheet of paper that automatically moves at hand. The spectacle should be recognized as quite mesmerizing - especially considering that the automaton was created almost 250 years ago and still works perfectly.
The success of Dro's clockwork dolls was enormous. In Paris, the dolls had competitors - dolls made by the French mechanic Jacques Vaucanson. Jacques Vaucanson took up the theme of "The Musician" - he made "The Flutist", which could perform 11 melodies. But Jacques Vaucanson's masterpiece was a duck-shaped doll that could walk, swim, quack, and shake off its wings. The duck knew how to swallow grains and even digest food - in its abdomen there was a vessel with chemical reagents that decomposed grains.
The doll of this glorious duck, unlike the Dro dolls, did not survive to this day - Vokanson brought it to Russia, where it was burned down during a fire at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. In Russia, the fashion for mechanical dolls was widespread. We can recall the Peacock clock made by the mechanic Kons (today they are in the Hermitage), Ivan Kulibin's “theatrical” clock “Goose Egg” (his “theatrical” clock “Goose Egg” is also in the Hermitage), as well as the works of Tula masters praised by Leskov in “Lefthander.
The appearance in Europe at the end of the 18th century of "groovy people" was associated with attempts to explain human nature in general. Back in the 17th century, Descartes spoke of man "as a mechanical machine endowed with a soul." Philosophical discussions on the topic of "human mechanics" did not subside throughout the entire century of the Enlightenment: the philosopher LaMettrie answered Descartes with the book "Man-Machine", which became popular. Mechanical people were a kind of miniature copies of living people.
Clockwork toys were so popular that for four decades they replaced the traditional mechanical miracle of those years - the pocket watch. In the 19th century, many watch manufactories had mechanical toys in their production. Mechanical dolls were still of interest to the public, but they fell in price and therefore lost their status - in the 1880s, a doll could be bought in a regular store. The fashion for clockwork dolls passed at the beginning of the 20th century, and with the appearance in 1928 of the first electric doll, a robot, mechanical dolls were completely forgotten.
The painter is an automaton created in 1773 and composed of 2,000 parts. He can paint three pictures: a portrait of Louis XV and his dog with the inscription "Mon toutou" (from French - my dog), the royal couple Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, and a scene with Cupid driving a chariot drawn by butterflies.
The mechanism consists of a system of cams that control the movement of the hand in two dimensions, and are also responsible for lifting the pencil. In addition, the automaton fidgets on the chair and periodically blows dust off the pencil.
This dog is the favorite doggie of the French king Louis XVI, drawn by an automaton, and the profile of the king.
The Musician Girl was made from 2,500 pieces and is different from other automatons. She is a fragile young girl sitting at a small flute organ. The automaton has a mechanism that activates ten fingers of the girl who is actually playing the instrument.
The five different melodies that the automaton can play were written by the son of the master, Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz, who was not only a skilled mechanic, but also a gifted musician. The mechanism of the "girl-musician", rather complicated in design, consists of four parts that activate the bellows of the instrument, each hand of the musician, as well as such actions as the shoulders heaving from breathing, the doll even "breathes" (you can see how the chest rises), body tilts, eye movements, and a final reference. The girl emphasizes the movements of the hand during the game, is able to cast a glance left and right, ending the playing of the organ with a curtsy.
The Mechanical Dolls came back to the public in 2003, when the Jaquet Droz manufactory exhibited the restored "Writing Boy" as an exhibit in its pavilion at the Basel Watch Fair (the baby was brought in once a day and crowds flocked to see the doll). The interest in the toy turned out to be so great that it was decided to re-release the "automatons" - there were already those who wanted to collect toys, the cost of which was not lower than the cost of the astronomical onion clock, a traditional collectible. "Automatons" are as fashionable today as watches with a lot of complications. The current assortment of Jaquet Droz includes the same "Writing Boy", "Drawer", "Musician" (the watchmakers promise to come up with new, in particular dancing, dolls). It will take about six months to make one doll,and the price (depending on the size and the chosen materials) can reach a million francs.
