Hands-On The Jaquet Droz Charming Bird, A Musical Automaton Wristwatch

The Jaquet Droz Charming Bird wristwatch is as far from the world of useful, utilitarian tool watches as it is possible for a watch to be. In fact, it's barely a wristwatch at all – in architecture, you'd call something like this a "folly." A building is called a folly when it's either purely decorative, with a form that suggests a practical function, or when it's simply extremely decorative (this is not a word you hear a lot nowadays – architectural follies having long since gone violently out of fashion, though many other follies seem to be flourishing).

The thrill you get out of the Charming Bird watch, on the assumption that you find this sort of thing thrilling to begin with – whimsy leaves a lot of people cold – is the same you get out of watching an especially good magic trick. It's a piece of mechanical sleight of hand that, unlike actual stage magic, is more fun the more you know about how it works.

The Charming Bird watch came out in 2013, and this is a newer version with the addition of an engraved mother-of-pearl dial (the original has a transparent dial, allowing you to see more of the mechanism, as well as a hand-painted bird.)  Though they're recent production for Jaquet Droz, the Charming Bird watches come from a couple of much, much older traditions – placing animated figures in clocks or on watch dials, on the one hand, and the separate tradition of creating automatons on the other. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the creation of many exotic automata, including several that were just downright weird (a mechanical duck that eats and defecates, anyone?) 

The watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, for whom the modern company is named, is famous for having created several automata, the most famous of which is The Writer, a humanoid robot capable of inking a goose quill and writing a sentence up to 40 characters long. Some of the most interesting automata are the so called "singing bird boxes" (boîte à oiseau chanteur), which are ornate containers topped with a mechanical bird that, as it pirouettes and flaps its wings, seems to be chirping in synchrony with its movements. Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son, along with fellow watchmaker Jean-Frederic Leschot (who collaborated with the Jaquet-Droz family on The Writer as well) made several of these bird boxes, which weren't always boxes – one, for instance, is a glass urn, with a transparent body that lets you see the mechanism.

The original Charming Bird watch from 2013 is a bit of a combination of the Singing Bird Urn, and a Singing Bird pocket watch, made in 1785.

The basic mechanism behind all these was similar: a bellows, operated by a spring-powered clockwork mechanism, provided the flow of air necessary to operate what's essentially a miniature pipe organ. As the air is forced through the pipes, a whistling noise is produced and the pitch varies depending on the size of the pipes. That's basically how the Charming Bird works, although instead of a bellows, it uses a crankshaft that pushes air through a series of three pistons whose barrels are made of synthetic sapphire.

The case is constructed so as to allow air to be drawn in, and also to allow the sound of the bird's twittering to escape more easily (the sound is not especially loud, but it's easily audible above ambient noise in an ordinary room). The Charming Bird, by the way, is not a repeater; the tune the bird chirps doesn't have any specific relationship to the time, which was the case with the Singing Bird pocket watch from 1780 as well. However, what it does have in common with chiming watches, including minute repeaters, is that a speed governor is required to control the rate of chiming. The Charming Bird uses a magnetic regulator, which is visible in the image above as a grey disk under the Y-shaped black bridge located at 12:00, just to the bird's right.

The Charming Bird isn't an attempt to create a perfect mechanical simulacrum of avian life, and it's probably just as well; for one thing, it would be technically impossible (I think) to get a purely mechanical, wristwatch-sized automaton to get anywhere near something like that.  For another thing, as anyone who's been keeping abreast of modern robotics knows, that kind of thing can go uncanny valley very fast. 

No, what makes the Charming Bird charming, is what made its ancestors charming: it's not so much an imitation of nature, as it is an homage to nature, and its frivolousness – the fact that it's exactly the opposite of the purposeful instrumentality that drove 500 years of improvements in precision mechanical timekeeping – is not just a part of its appeal, but rather essential to it. Wind up the spring barrel powering the mechanism (the crown winds the timekeeping train in one direction, and the chirping mechanism in the other) and off the Charming Bird goes, warbling its pneumatic song.

The Charming Bird is a delightful piece of exotica, and a very expensive one of course; at $430,500, it can be railed against on any of the grounds against which one would, well, rail against any $430,500 watch. The cost is kind of irrelevant, though. The watch is in that realm of objects that exist to express ideas, and provide satisfactions, that have absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely resembling practical considerations. It's a piece of entertaining absurdity, just as its predecessors were in their time – all those hare-brained, madly conceived, obsessively constructed robots and elaborate striking jacks and automata of yesteryear.

The fact that so much mechanical precision is involved in bringing the Charming Bird to life, and that so many mechanical problems had to be solved to do that, is in startling contrast to the effect to which that precision and those solutions make possible. It's purely a child's pleasure at the animation of a windup toy that the Charming Bird is after, but I can't imagine anyone could watch it go for the first time without feeling at least a little tickled (at the HODINKEE office, where it takes a lot horologically speaking to get people out from behind their desks, the Charming Bird evoked an unplanned company meeting and several admiring "get the hell outta here" remarks when I set it going for the first time). This kind of thing always makes me think of Dr. George Daniels's comment on the remontoir, in Watchmaking: 

"The use of the remontoir is by far the best method of smoothing the power supply, but it is complex and costly to make. For this reason watches with remontoirs are very rare and this, combined with their attractive action, gives them a special place in the affections of the connoisseur of mechanics. The fact that the mechanism is quite unnecessary merely adds to its charm."

The Jaquet Droz Charming Bird: Hand-engraved and hand-painted white mother of pearl dial with black onyx sub-dial for the hours and minutes. Case, 18k red gold. Hand-wound movement with singing bird (God help you if you got this far without noticing). 38-hour power reserve, 47mm diameter. Limited edition of eight pieces. Price, $430,500.