caged automata · 19th–20th centuries
This is a collection of automatons — mechanical songbirds of the 19th–20th centuries. Inside every cage hides a tiny mechanism: a spring, a bellows and a piston whistle. Wind the key — and the bird sings, turns its head and flaps its wings as if alive.
Every automaton in the collection has been fully restored in our workshop: each movement was taken apart, cleaned and tuned. All the birds sing and are in full working order.
We have been collecting songbirds for over thirty years: buying at European auctions, acquiring them from private families, finding them at flea markets. Each bird arrives “as is” — and leaves the workshop singing. That is why we know everything about these mechanisms: from the shape of a rivet to the mood of the maker who assembled it.
A few turns of the key wind the spring — enough for several verses of the song.
Air is pushed through a piston whistle: the bird whistles, trills and draws out its phrases.
Cams and levers turn the head, open the beak, make the wings and tail tremble.
Karl Griesbaum was a renowned German master mechanic and the founder of a company that produced mechanical musical snuffboxes featuring singing birds. Born in the Black Forest region into a family of clockmakers, he established his own business in the town of Triberg in 1905.
Parisian Blaise Bontems, followed by his son Charles, made the caged songbird the standard of the automaton. The Bontems stamp still raises a cage’s price at auctions.
The Roullet & Decamps factory turned the automaton from a palace curiosity into a public favourite. The “R&D” mark is a sign of the golden age of automata.
The Swiss Henri Maillardet built the “Draughtsman-Writer” with the largest cam “memory” in history: seven drawings and poems in two languages.