I was thinking about the Musician in late May, when I shared the stage with a robot named Sophia and her creator, David Hanson, at the Mountainfilm Festival, in Telluride, Colorado. The word “robot” would not enter the lexicon for more than a hundred years, but Jaquet-Droz is now considered the primary creator of some of the world’s first androids-robots with a human form.
Jaquet-Droz proceeded to demonstrate his automata in the royal courts of England, the Netherlands, and Russia, where they enthralled the nobility and made him rich and famous. She was dressed in a stiff rococo ball gown and seated at an organ as her articulated fingers danced across the keyboard, her head and eyes followed her hands, and her chest rose and fell, each “breath” animating her apparent emotional connection to the music. In 1775, a Swiss watchmaker named Pierre Jaquet-Droz visited King Louis VI and Queen Marie Antoinette, in Versailles, to show off his latest creation: a “living doll” called the Musician.
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