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Jaquet Droz Loving Butterfly Automaton
According to chaos theory pioneer Edward Norton Lorenz’s famous hypothesis, the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil might just cause a tornado in Texas weeks later. The 300 delicate lepidopteric flutters this piece can produce in around two minutes really ought to cause a watch industry storm that’s off the E.F. scale.
The Loving Butterfly Automaton’s story begins around 240 years ago, when the founder, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and his son, Henri-Louis, were in the midst of creating a range of extraordinary automata — tiny animated mechanisms — that delighted the far-flung kings and emperors of Europe and Asia, and are deemed by some academics to be an early form of the computer. These included The Writer (featuring a young boy scoring his name with a pen dipped into an inkwell) and The Female Musician (which appears to breathe, and switches glances between sheet music and the fingers).
One of Henri-Louis’s sketches, of a cherub seated on a chariot drawn by a butterfly, provided inspiration for Jaquet Droz’s designers today, who decided to apply the concept to a modern wristwatch: thus, at Baselworld earlier this year,
