Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Museum of Art and History of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, has housed three of the traveling automatons that toured Europe for 150 years with the greatest success: The Clerk, The Organist and The Draftsman, built between 1768 and 1774 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the center of the nineteenth-century watch industry and birthplace of Le Corbusier. This is the joint work of Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790), his son Henry-Louis (1752-1791) and Jean-Frédéric Leschot (1746-1824) delivered to the city on May 1, 1909 with the condition that they be kept in operation and on display. Thanks to her, on the first Sunday of the month, a watchmaking expert presents them to the public who come to the museum to admire these android automatons, the stars of the mechanical shows of the 18th century.
In 1750, La Chaux-de-Fonds, a city founded in 1656 in the Jura mountains and on land unsuitable for agriculture, had about 2,500 inhabitants, of which about 200 were dedicated to clockmaking and pendulum assembly. By 1786, the population had doubled while the proportion of watchmakers continued to increase: the census of that time shows 1,034 watchmakers, 53 engravers, 6 goldsmiths and countless workers dedicated to enamels, polishing or making springs, boxes, cases. , instruments and needles. In fact, a form of proto-industrial manufacturing was born there: établissage, that is, the manufacture of a product by dividing work into specialized and independent domestic units and assembling the parts at the last moment of the process. It allowed a very fine distribution of tasks and the specialization of the worker in the operation that he dominated, which was carried out at home and within families, as a temporary activity that took place in the winter. La Chaux-de-Fonds burned down in 1794, an event used to rebuild it according to a grid scheme in accordance with the organization of work, orienting the windows towards the sun and with gardens in front. In the 19th century it became the great hub of the watch industry and, for Marx, the perfect example of a district whose urban fabric could be considered a large factory city, the model of direct cooperation of partial workers [1]. at the service of capital.
Between them and in the 18th century, the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz dedicated himself to luxury clocks and pendulums, developing an automatic winding mechanism for pocket watches as well as automatons of all kinds, including songbird clocks. On the guided tour of the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History, it is said that in 1758 he brought a clock to the Spanish court, which, when striking the time, had a shepherd playing a melody on the flute while a dog approached him. . King Ferdinand VI - depressed by the death of his wife Barbara of Braganza - was so enchanted by the ingenuity of the watchmaker from Neuchâtel that he acquired several of his pendulums, receiving a large sum that, upon his return to La Chaux-de- Fonds, Jaquet-Droz would invest wisely. On the one hand, he bought a central and elegant property to install his workshop and, on the other, taking advantage of Madrid's success to project himself in the international market. Soon, with his son and partner, he devised an ideal means to promote his watches and his great technical and inventive capacity: android automata. Father and son lived in Paris, Geneva and London, where Henry, from 1775, presented the mechanical show starring his dolls. While Leschot took them on a tour of the European courts; Henry Jaquet-Droz associated himself with English watchmakers and merchants who introduced mechanical games and Jurassic clocks to China.
The automata were designed and built with two objectives: to entertain the courts of Europe, a source of potential buyers of luxury pieces, and to take on the challenge posed by the miniaturization and synchronization of the different technical systems developed. Starting in 1774, they were exhibited in La Chaux-de-Fonds which, thanks to this success, became an obligatory passage for those visiting the mountains of the Principality of Neuchâtel. After their stay in London, the automata enjoyed a long nomadic life, in which throughout the 19th century they were sold and lost several times, preserving the name of their manufacturers who, despite having died, continued to be synonymous quality. In 1906 they were purchased by the Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Neuchâtel for 75,000 gold francs and then donated to the museum, where they have remained ever since.
There, on the first Sunday of each month and in three different shifts, a specialized watchmaker with studies in conservation comes to wind them. The organist plays five musical motifs - probably composed by Jaquet-Droz - by pressing with her fingers the keys of a real organ, built to her size and ergonomically. She "breathes" (her chest rises and falls), she follows her hands with her gaze and moves her torso, ending her recital with a bow. The draftsman, built between 1772 and 1774, is capable of executing a portrait of Louis XV, a royal couple (George III and his wife), a dog with the inscription "Mon toutou", and Cupid driving a chariot pulled by a butterfly. It operates through a system of cams that encode hand movements in both dimensions of the blade; A third cam is used to raise or lower the pencil. From time to time, the doll blows on his work to remove the pencil shavings. The scribe, the first in the series (1768-1772), is the most complex of the three: he uses a system similar to that of the draftsman to trace the characters of the alphabet using a pen that he dips in an inkwell while his eyes follow the text he outlines. . Text is encoded or programmed into a wheel, the length of whose teeth determines the choice of character to be drawn.
The world of the 18th century was amazed by these things. Thus, in 1742 and near Nancy, the architect Emmanuel Héré de Corny (1705-1763), had built an “Artificial Rock” or “Rocher de Lunéville” against the retaining wall of the northern terrace of the castle of the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Stanislas Lecszcinsky (1677-1766), along the Grand Canal. Héré dedicated several pages to it in his "Recueil des plans, élévations et coupes... des châteaux et dépendances que le Roi de Pologne occupe en Lorraine" (see image) published in 1752. In this setting composed of rocks and caves, 88 were installed automata that represented characters and scenes from everyday life and that worked thanks to cables set in motion by a hydraulic system. The mechanical parts had been created by François Richard, the duke's watchmaker and plumber. Famous in its time, the Rocher contributed to the renown of Stanislas Castle. It formed a kind of mountainous landscape made of sandstone blocks and arranged in a U shape for about 250 meters. On the west side, there was a balustrade with a balcony supported by Tuscan columns, from where the courtiers observed the complex and the moving automatons. On it, some wooden or brick buildings were located, such as a mill, an inn and a barn, scenes of rural life could be seen. The automatons were flat cardboard figures representing various occupations such as miller, shepherd, carder, blacksmith, sharpener, carter, washerwoman, peasant, musician, soldier, as well as children in a hammock, a hermit praying and numerous animals: horse, dog, cat, sheep, rat, chickens, goat, cow, pigeons and a monkey. At the ends of the U, four openings were hollowed out, simulating grottoes, with a trompe-l'oeil painting at the bottom. It is known from two iconographic sources: the Recueil and a painting attributed to André Joly (1706 - 1781), preserved in the Lorraine museum, a territory that after the war of Austrian succession had been awarded to the Duke.
Upon the death of Stanislas, in 1766, the complex was dismantled and the automata were put up for sale, withdrawn by the successful bidder Krantz, the manufacturer of the duke's fountains. At the beginning of the 19th century, only a pile of a few stones survived, demolished around 1860. A century earlier, in 1767, Henry-Louis Jaquet-Droz had passed through Nancy and it is very likely that he was inspired by The Rock for the design of the “Grotto” from the family workshop, also lost today. It was the fourth automaton, perhaps the most impressive, representing a pastoral scene: a flutist courting a shepherdess. "La Grotte", as it was known, was lost during the French Revolution, sold with the other three to the Gendre brothers of Madrid, in 1787. Since then, no trace of it has disappeared.
In 1760, several scribes were traveling around Europe, such as those made by Friedrich von Knaus (1724 - 1789), a watchmaker from Aldingen am Neckar (Baden-Württemberg): the miraculous or self-writing machine, which was presented to Emperor Francis I in 1760, and another that designed a text of up to 107 characters and that in 1764 was presented to María Teresa. To the Austrian Empress, in 1750, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her enthronement, the Knaus brothers had already given her, on behalf of the Landgrave [2] Louis VIII, the so-called Imperial Presentation Clock.
These brothers built flutist automata, although the most famous was the so-called Four Talking Heads, capable of pronouncing five vowels, made in 1779 as a result of the annual competition organized by the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg. In the same field, intended to promote the artificial production of the human voice, they were preceded by those presented in 1783 in Paris by the Abbe Mical (1727-1789), designed in such a way that they communicated with each other by alternating speech. Mical had used a system controlled by rollers that produced organ-like resonances. They could speak a predetermined number of sentences and were mounted on a pedestal in a small theater. The phrases praised King Louis XVI and the mechanism resembled the beginning of a music box. Today it is considered the first programmable speech simulator.
These are, as we see, traveling machines where, it could not be otherwise, tricks abounded. Among them, the chess player presented in 1768 by the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804) and whose structure began to be suspected of hiding a person - a chess genius - who operated from within. The machine showed a man of natural height, dressed as a Turk, sitting in front of a table with a chess board. The original “Turkish”, after passing through several owners and traveling through Europe, the United States and Havana, burned in the fire at the Peale Museum in Philadelphia in 1854. The chess player, as well as the scribe and draftsman from Neuchâtel They all resort to the same device: the pantograph, which as defined in the Encyclopedia, is an instrument used to copy the lines of all kinds of drawings and paintings and to reduce them, if desired, to a large or small size. It consists of four mobile rules adjusted to each other on four pivots, which form a parallelogram. At the end of one of these extended rulers there is a point which runs along all the lines of the picture, while a pencil held at the end of another similar branch lightly traces these lines of the same size, large or small, on the paper or plane in the one you want to transfer them to.
On the other hand, and in the domain of the synthetic voice, in 1791 Kempelen built and exhibited a more elaborate machine to generate connected statements, something that was not taken very seriously due to the doubts generated by his chess player. The talking machine, however, was a real device: it used a bellows to supply air to a reed which, in turn, excited a manually variable resonator to produce vocal sounds. Consonants, including nasals, were simulated using four separate narrow passages, controlled by the fingers of the other hand.
At the Museum of Art and History of Neuchâtel, during the visit to the automata, the public is amazed when, before the demonstration, the insides are opened on the back of the dolls to explain the clockwork mechanism that animates them. The revelation of the secret aims to create a kind of prehistory of contemporary robotic engineering. However, when they were conceived and exhibited in the courts or before the public, it was never revealed how the action occurred, to the point that it was said that the scribe wrote from the dictation.
These automata, resulting from the meeting of a technical, scientific, industrial and commercial culture, promoted on the one hand the virtues of the workshop that manufactured them and, on the other, were the materialization of the studies of the mechanisms that governed the life of living beings. The organist's fingers, for example, are the result of an analysis of the hand joint and resemble the anatomical prostheses of arms, legs and hands that the Swiss workshop sold in London and Geneva. In this case, the orthopedic mechanism was covered with cardboard, cork and leather. The Jaquet-Droz-Leschot - let us highlight - were members of several learned societies, where they made their art available to any experiment related to the innovations of their time. In this framework, other manufacturers used their automata to explain, for example, animal digestion from mechanical and chemical principles: such is the case of the famous “defecating duck” by Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782) who, together with the flutist and the drummer, in 1738 were presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Vaucanson, whose automatons survive only on paper, then dedicated himself to the mechanization of weaving in the Lyon silk industry.
In the 19th century, automata passed from the court and the academies of science to the mass entertainment industry. They were incorporated into the so-called popular anatomical museums, traveling museums that carried wax models from here to there, dedicated to different organs or diseases, but also to imitations of these clockwork pieces whose time had already passed. Both the wax and the automatons - remembers the person in charge of putting those from Neuchâtel to work - were made to travel and be in motion, which meant that in addition to the boss, they always did it with someone who was capable of repairing or fine-tuning them. every time they arrived at their temporary destination. An investment that was justified by the direct or indirect profits they generated.
Waxes and automatons were losing prominence with the new entertainment industries. Cinema and television contributed to its definitive oblivion, its dismantling or, in the best of cases, its confinement to a sedentary life in a museum and, in the form of a book, philosophical essay or academic thesis, on the shelves. of the libraries.
In 1752, the Encyclopedia defined an automaton as a device or machine that moves by itself and that carries within itself the principle of its movement, while for android it specified that it was an automaton with a human figure and that by means of some springs Well organized, they acted and performed functions that, in appearance, resembled human ones. Today they would be called robots, a word invented by the Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890-1938) in the 20th century in the domain of theater and literature, an expression of the fears of the 1910s regarding the reification and automation of humans. A fear that does not cease although the drift of automatons should teach us that, no matter how bad it may be, everything, if it does not end up in the trash, ends up locked in a museum room, pending the arrival of the human being to wind it up. , clean the gears and put it to work.
Notes:
[1] Workers who, specialized, work in a specific section of the production process.
[2] Landgrave: nobleman who has jurisdiction over a territory.
* Special for Hilario. Arts Letters Trades. Article written within the framework of SciCoMove, the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101007579.