# The Jaquet-Droz Automata (The Writer, The Draughtsman, The Musician) > Jaquet-Droz and Leschot workshop (Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frederic Leschot) - 1768-1774 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/jaquet-droz-leschot-workshop/jaquet-droz-automata-neuchatel/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-10 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Jaquet-Droz and Leschot workshop (Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frederic Leschot) - **Date:** 1768-1774 - **Medium:** Brass, steel and wood mechanism housed inside articulated figures dressed in eighteenth-century court costume - **Dimensions:** The Writer approximately 70 cm high, seated. Comparable published dimensions for the Draughtsman and the Musician were not found in the sources consulted. - **Object type:** Clocks and instruments - **Period:** Swiss, eighteenth century (Enlightenment) - **Current location:** Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Neuchatel, Switzerland - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary Three life-sized mechanical figures built at La Chaux-de-Fonds between 1768 and 1774 by the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and their associate Jean-Frederic Leschot: a boy who writes any programmed text up to forty characters, a boy who draws four fixed pictures, and a young woman who plays a real pipe organ with her own fingers while her chest appears to breathe. Toured before European courts as advertisements for the family's watchmaking business, sold together with a fourth, now-lost automaton in 1787, and untraceable for well over a century afterward, the three survivors were bought by a Neuchatel historical society in 1906 and have belonged to the city's Musee d'Art et d'Histoire since 1909, where all but the Writer are still wound and demonstrated for the public.They are treated today as an early landmark in the history of programmable machines: the Writer's set of interchangeable cams, one for each possible character, is a mechanical read-only memory that a period visitor could reconfigure to make the boy write a different message. That claim on the automata's importance rests on documented mechanism, not on hindsight alone. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1768-1774** Workshop of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frederic Leschot, La Chaux-de-Fonds `[documented]` (construction) Built over six years and first shown to the public at La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1774, alongside a fourth automaton, La Grotte, since lost. Sources agree on the three-name attribution to the workshop as a whole; they do not fully agree on which of the three men is individually credited with the Musician versus the Draughtsman. - **1774-1787** The Jaquet-Droz and Leschot workshop, touring `[documented]` (exhibition tour) Shown at La Chaux-de-Fonds and Geneva, then presented in Paris by 1775, where Jean-Frederic Leschot is specifically recorded (Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse) as the family member who most often carried the automata abroad and who was received at the French court. A separately documented "Mechanical Spectacle" ran in Paris in 1775 and in London between 1775 and 1777. Claims that the three androids themselves also appeared before the Spanish court were not independently confirmed and are not treated as established here. - **1787** The Gendre brothers, Madrid `[documented]` (sale) All four automata, including La Grotte, sold together to the Gendre brothers of Madrid in 1787. Reported via the French Wikipedia account of the automata, which is a tertiary source and is flagged here for replacement with an archival or scholarly citation. - **1787-1906** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) Described in the same tertiary source as a nomadic period in which the automata were repeatedly sold and lost track of. No continuous ownership chain for the three surviving androids was found for this period of roughly 119 years. La Grotte is believed, on a later historian's inference rather than on direct record, to have broken down and been discarded somewhere within this span. - **1906** Societe d'histoire et d'archeologie du canton de Neuchatel `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased the three surviving automata in 1906 for 75,000 gold francs. The seller is not named in the sources consulted. - **1909-present** City of Neuchatel, Musee d'Art et d'Histoire `[documented]` (donation and permanent display) The Society gave the three automata to the City of Neuchatel on 1 May 1909. They have remained in the museum's keeping since, with what the museum itself describes as almost no interruption, and two of the three are still demonstrated to the public on a published schedule. ## Open questions - From whom did the Societe d'histoire et d'archeologie du canton de Neuchatel purchase the three automata in 1906? The seller is not named in any source consulted for this record. - Where were the three automata, and in whose hands, between the 1787 sale to the Gendre brothers in Madrid and the 1906 purchase? No source consulted supplies a continuous chain for this period of more than a century. - Exactly how was credit for the Musician and the Draughtsman divided between Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frederic Leschot? Two reputable accounts (a specialist horological history and the museum's own published account) do not fully agree. - Were the three androids themselves ever exhibited before the Spanish court, as some popular accounts state, or does this claim conflate them with Pierre Jaquet-Droz's separately documented 1758 solo journey to Spain with simpler clock-automata? This record found no independent confirmation either way. - What in fact became of La Grotte after 1787? Its presumed decay in storage is a historian's considered inference (Perregaux and Perrot, writing in the twentieth century), not a documented event. - What specific part has failed in the Writer, and when is restoration to working order expected? The museum's own account, current at the time of writing, states the problem exists but not its precise nature or timeline. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Jaquet-Droz automata'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the museum's own catalogue or a peer-reviewed history. - [2] Wikipedia (French), 'Automates Jaquet-Droz'. Tertiary source, the only one found to state the 1787 sale to the Gendre brothers of Madrid and the subsequent gap to 1906; flagged for replacement with an archival or scholarly citation. - [3] Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Neuchatel (MahN), 'The Jaquet-Droz automata', the museum's own current published account, including the Writer's present out-of-service status. - [4] Jaquet Droz (modern successor company), 'The extraordinary history of Jaquet Droz'. Company history; treated as promotional and cross-checked against independent sources where possible. - [5] The History Blog, 'The glory of 18th century Swiss automata'. - [6] Societe d'histoire et d'archeologie du canton de Neuchatel (Images du patrimoine), 'Le quatrieme automate des Jaquet-Droz'. - [7] Automates et boites a musique, dossier 'La grotte des Jaquet-Droz', citing Charles Perregaux and F. Louis Perrot's early twentieth-century history of the firm and a descriptive 1784 Lyon exhibition poster. - [8] Automates et boites a musique, dossier on Jean-Frederic Leschot, covering his documented prosthetic-limb designs of the early 1790s. - [9] Horlogerie Suisse (archived), 'Les trois automates (1768-1774): L'Ecrivain, le Dessinateur et la Musicienne realises par Pierre Jaquet-Droz et Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz', the source for the specific per-automaton authorship split reported in this record. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Pierre Jaquet-Droz'. - [11] Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, 'Leschot, Jean-Frederic'. - [12] Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, 'Jaquet-Droz, Pierre'. - [13] Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, 'Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis'. - [14] Adelheid Voskuhl, 'Producing objects, producing texts: accounts of android automata in late eighteenth-century Europe', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2007. Abstract and secondary discussion consulted; full text paywalled. - [15] Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self, University of Chicago Press. Scholarly monograph discussing the Musician automaton at length; consulted via publisher and secondary description only, not the full text. - [16] Antiquarian Horological Society (AAHS), 'The Writer'. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Maillardet's automaton', for the separate object at the Franklin Institute and its own documented misattribution history. - [18] The Franklin Institute, 'Maillardet's Automaton', the holding institution's own account of the object's 1928 donation and 2007 restoration. - [19] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Jaquet-Droz automata, source of the photographs used in this record. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.