Henri Maillardet

Henri Maillardet, born Jean Henri Nicholas Maillardet (1745 to 1830), was a Swiss mechanician of the eighteenth century who worked in London producing clocks and other mechanisms. He spent a period in the shops of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a maker of watches, clocks and automata, and with his brothers Jaques-Rodolphe and Jean David Maillardet he produced a series of automata depicting magicians. In 1805 he built a spring-activated automaton that draws pictures and writes verses in French and English, its motions produced by a series of cams on shafts in the base, and it is believed to have the largest cam-based memory of any automaton of its era. When it reached the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1928 its origin was unknown, until once restored it wrote the words written by the automaton of Maillardet. He died in Malines, Belgium, in 1830.