Jaquet-Droz automats

Among the many automats produced by the Jaquet-Droz family, the automats Jaquet-Droz indicate three parts manufactured by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frederic Leschot between 1767 and 1774: the musician , the draftsman and lécrivain . The three automats are perfectly functional; they can be admired with the Museum of Art and History of Neuchâtel in Suisse, and a demonstration of their operation is made first Sunday of each month. One can regard them as distances ancestors of the modern robots.

The automats were designed and built with a double aim: to amuse the courses royal of Europe, and to thus increase the receipts of the family company of clock industry of luxury (undertaken which perdure still today); to take up a technical challenge while being attacked, with the favor of an experimentation complexes between all (i.e.la artificial creation of a " pre-robot"), with the problems of miniaturization and synchronization of elaborate technical systems. The three automats had initially a life of nomads, were sold and lost several times, before being bought by the Company of History and Archeology of Neuchâtel in 1906 per 75.000 francs but, and offered to the museum from where they did not leave practically any more.

The musician

The musician is a player of organ which really plays: the music is not recorded or is not played by a Musical box, but is well played by the automat which inserts the keys of a true organ with its fingers (organ being of course built with its size and its ergonomics). It “breathes” (its chest rises and drops), it follows eyes the set of its hands, and it makes movements of the chest like a true organist, finishing his recital by a reverence with the public.

The draftsman

The draftsman is a headstock able to carry out four drawings: a portrait of Louis XV, a royal couple (it is thought that it would be about Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette), a dog accompanied by the inscription “My doggie”, and a Cupid driving a tank drawn by a butterfly.

The draftsman functions using a system of cam S which encodent the movements of the hand in two dimensions of the sheet; a third cam is used for raising or lowering the pencil. The automat blows from time to time on its work to remove from them the glares of pencil lead (a gesture which the modern mines made useless).

The writer

The writer is most complex of the three anthropomorphic automats. He uses a system similar to that of the draftsman to trace the characters of the alphabet, and can write using a set of 40 characters. The text is encodé on a wheel of which the length of the teeth determines the choice of the character to trace. The text is seldom changed to spare the mechanism; one of the last changes in date was done in the honor of François Mitterrand which had come to visit the city. The writer uses a goose feather which it from time to time soaks in an inkpot, by shaking it of a dry blow to prevent that a overflow of ink does not leave pies. Its eyes follow the text as he writes it, and its head turns when he seeks ink.

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