Between 1768 and 1774, in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and Jean-Frederic Leschot built three clockwork automata: the Writer, the Draughtsman, and the Musician. All three still operate and are held by the Musee d’art et d’histoire de Neuchatel, which displays them and documents their construction. The dates and makers given here come from the museum’s own account.
The Writer is the most striking from a computing standpoint. It is a seated boy figure that dips a quill in ink and writes on paper, forming each letter with genuine pen strokes. A set of interchangeable cams stores the shape of each character, and a separate input device of tabs lets an operator set which letters to write, so the same machine can produce any custom message up to about forty characters. That arrangement, a fixed mechanism plus a settable pattern that determines the output, is a tangible eighteenth-century example of programmable memory.
These figures mattered to the prehistory of artificial intelligence because they made a philosophical point physically vivid: lifelike, apparently purposeful behavior could be produced entirely by gears and cams. They fed a long European fascination with whether minds and bodies might themselves be elaborate machines, a question that runs straight through to modern debates about computation and thought.
For a general reader, the Writer is a clean illustration that the idea of reprogrammable behavior predates electronics by two centuries, and that the line between a clever machine and an apparent mind has always been contested.