Pierre Jaquet-Droz

Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721 to 1790) was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century, born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Principality of Neuchâtel, who lived in Paris, London and Geneva and built animated dolls called automata to help his firm sell watches and mechanical songbirds. With his son Henri Louis and Jean Frédéric Leschot he constructed between 1768 and 1774 The Writer, The Musician and The Draughtsman, now housed at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel. His source notes that some consider these devices the oldest examples of the computer: The Writer sets tabs that define each letter, forming a programmable memory, and has 40 cams that represent a read only program. Their making predates the work of Charles Babbage by decades.