The Signing Machine: The Art of Automata Interpreted by Jaquet Droz

Almost three centuries have passed since Pierre JaquetDroz held the royal courts of Europe spellbound with his trio of renowned and strikingly realistic automata The Writer, The Draughtsman and The Musician. The most astonishing of these was The Writer, because, even then, it could be programmed to produce a given sentence in a flowing script. This truly legendary automaton is considered the precursor of the computer and has been the subject of numerous scientific studies, as well as a source of inspir