The Writing Boy – the 18th Century “Printer”
In the early 1770s, Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz created something extraordinary for its time.
The craftsman created an automaton – a programmable android in the form of a boy writer, capable of writing up to 40 characters with a quill pen.
He called his creation “Calligrapher.” The device’s appearance is deceptively simple: a small barefoot boy, the height of a five-year-old child, sits at a wooden table and holds a pen.
It can easily be mistaken for a toy doll, but behind this shell lies a true miracle of engineering. 6,000 moving parts work harmoniously together to set the writing mechanism in motion.
The calligrapher does more than just write words: he turns his head toward the inkwell, dips the quill pen into the ink, and shakes it to avoid blots. The eyes of this automaton are able to follow the written text.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a famous innovator in watchmaking, was born in 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. He became a skilled master of animated clocks with singing birds and fountains, musical clocks, and also an outstanding creator of automatic mechanisms - automatons.
The "Writing Boy" was the first automatic doll developed by the master in 1773.
The body of the "automaton" was made of wood, and the head was made of porcelain. It took 20 months to create. The clockwork boy would write phrases on a blank sheet of paper (for example, “I love you, my city” or “Pierre-Jacquet Droz is my inventor”), blot the ink with a paperweight, look thoughtfully at what he had written, and then throw the sheet away and start writing again.
Droz staged the premiere of “The Boy” in Paris in 1774 — at the court of Louis XVI, who had just ascended to the throne, the “living” doll caused a real sensation.