Sunday Morning Special: Henri Maillardet’s Writing Automaton

The little fellow without his clothes.

The Eighteenth Century Swiss mechanician Henri Maillardet worked in London for most of his life, producing fine clocks and clockwork mechanisms. He was particularly celebrated for his complicated automata.

This particular model writes a series of poems in both French and English as well as executes drawings. When the automaton was welcomed into the Franklin Institute, they were unsure of its creator. However, at the end of its cycle of drawing, it produced the answer for them by writing, “Written by the Automaton of Maillardet.”