Pierre Jaquet-Droz was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1721 and opened his watchmaking workshop there in 1738. Through the 1760s he built a successful trade producing complicated pocket watches for European royal courts, and in 1758 travelled to Madrid to present singing-bird boxes to King Ferdinand VI of Spain. But the work for which Jaquet-Droz is now historically famous is his androids: three mechanical humanoid automata, The Writer, The Draughtsman, and The Musician, completed in 1774. The three androids, still working today at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel, contain thousands of parts each and are considered among the greatest achievements of pre-industrial mechanical engineering.
The Writer can compose any text up to 40 characters via a programmable cam system, the Draughtsman produces four different drawings, and the Musician plays five tunes on a real organ with her fingers while her chest rises and falls with breath and her eyes follow her hands. The androids were acquired by Neuchâtel city in 1906 and today are operated for the public on the first Sunday of each month. They predate the Jacquard loom by three decades and arguably represent the first programmable automata.
The original Jaquet-Droz firm closed in the early 19th century. The modern Jaquet Droz brand was revived in 1995 and acquired by Swatch Group in 2000. Swatch has positioned Jaquet Droz as the group's artistic-dial and automata specialist, complementary to Breguet's haute-horlogerie positioning. The signature design is the Grande Seconde, a figure-8 dial layout with hours and minutes in the upper sub-dial and a large seconds sub-dial occupying the lower half, a pattern Pierre Jaquet-Droz himself used on 18th-century pocket watches.
Modern Jaquet Droz specialises in hand-painted miniature enamel dials, hand-engraved dials, and automata wristwatches that carry on the Jaquet-Droz android tradition in miniature. The Charming Bird (2013) features a singing bird that emerges from the dial and flutters its wings while chirping, driven by a purely mechanical bellows. The Magic Lotus Automaton shows a lotus flower opening on the dial. Retail prices run from ~CHF 17,000 (Grande Seconde Off-Centered) to CHF 300,000+ for animated automata and hand-painted enamel grand complications. Production is small, concentrated on hand-decorated dials produced in the Jaquet Droz atelier in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
