Lifelike Machines

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s legacy of building extremely complex automata lives on today in his namesake company’s creations, now miniaturised for the wrist 

- Jamie Tan

The weird and wonderful world of automata is a curious subset within the field of watchmaking. Take a reductionist approach, and they appear identical – each uses a series of wheels and levers that siphon off the energy stored in a spring to perform timed and regulated motions elsewhere. Unlike clocks and watches, however, automata perform far more intricate movements, and are/were often made to mimic actual humans and animals.

Of course, automata are exponentially more difficult to create, so they remained a rare luxury built for the wealthy and royalty. For Pierre Jaquet-Droz, they were also marketing tools. The watchmaker produced a series of three automata with help from his son, Henri-Louis, and his adoptive son, Jean-Frédéric Leschot, to demonstrate his skills as a watchmaker. This, in turn, helped his firm’s sales in clocks and simpler automata such as cuckoo clocks.

These automata can be considered analogue computers, they were literally programmed – not with lines of code in C++ or Javascript, but via permutations of actual, physical cams – to perform different actions. As a testament to Jaquet-Droz’s skill, one only need observe these automata in action today (they are preserved in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Neuchâtel), to appreciate how lifelike the dolls are, and how closely they tread to the uncanny valley.

THE THREE AUTOMATA