Singing bird box

The French term tabatière has also come to be used for any small decorative box resembling a snuffbox in form but not necessarily any longer used to contain snuff.

This motor is doing two basic jobs: The first one is to operate a small bellows which supplies air, via a wind chest, to a whistle which produces the birdsong and the second task is to rotate a number of cams.

To Pierre Jaquet-Droz (born 1721), regarded as one of the most celebrated automata maker of all times, is credited the invention of the boîte à oiseau chanteur.

He became a great master of singing bird technology, creating some of the most wonderful pieces sold by the Jaquet-Droz firm and contributing to their fame.

Around 1800, he set up his own business and sought to show his creations to influential people, including Napoleon Bonaparte and organised an exhibition of his works in Zurich in 1809, but his efforts remained fruitless.

In 1810, Leschot had virtually retired and Frisard had died, so it was left to Frères Rochat to continue to produce high-quality singing bird boxes in the tradition of Jaquet-Droz and so they did until 1849.

Among them is Louis Rochat, originally from l'Abbaye in the Vallée de Joux, who is considered to be the maker of a piece with clock and singing birds (today in the Peking Museum) which won a prize from the Genevan Réunion des Industriels in 1829.

Finally, the last of the great master mechanicians in the crafting of tabatières in the true tradition of the Jaquet-Droz, the also Swiss Bruguier family.

He would gain great fame in the production of miniaturized songbird snuff boxes (he made other kinds of pieces as well), among his contributions are the improvements in the sound and the extension of the bird's performance, his movements, contained in richly decorated cases often by famous Genevan enamelists such as Richter, Dufey and Procchietto, were also distinguished for its quiet running.

The family returned to Geneva in 1823, where Charles senior began to study the bird boxes of the time and to manufacture them, planning both improvements and methods to increase its production rate and therefore making this article to come within the reach of more people.

During the Jaquet-Droz/Leschot/Frisard period and in the early days of Rochat (up to about 1815) the detailed arrangement of the bird box movement underwent a series of changes, made to simplify operation and to ensure greater reliability, but in general, they did not affect the performance greatly.

With the end of the Rochat family business around 1850 and the death of Charles Bruguier father, virtually all innovative work on the fusee-wound movement ceased.

[7] During the second half of the nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I, Paris was the booming center of automata production worldwide and it is in this historical context that the Maison Bontems flourished.

In 1814 Blaise Bontems was born in the village of Le Ménil in France, he progressed to become a master clockmaker and in time one of the foremost producers specialized in mechanical birds and other automated animals.

Sometime in the 1870s, they introduced their tabatières which resembled in external appearance to some of the Rochat and Bruguier models, but they had developed a completely different mechanism of entirely novel design.

Identification rests mainly on the individual style of his movements and deep-bodied birds which does not turn their heads, showing (in common with those of Flajoulot) a bone or ivory beak.

A successful house lauded for the realistic quality of their songs, they exhibited in several Universal expositions and fairs where they were awarded with 43 medals of gold, silver, vermeil and bronze in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia.

It is of simple and sturdy construction and in its day made ownership of a singing bird box possible to a wider public than any of its Swiss predecessors.

His singing bird pieces were almost identical to those of his relatives and the movements were supplied by them, although they were signed having stamped on the top plate the inscription "AB France".

[9] Lastly, Juvenia operated in France from around 1893, they produced several models being the most popular of its range a sarcophagus-form wooden case with hand painted country scenes and people dressed in the 18th century manner.

John Manger, listed as working in London from 1875 to 1881 in Brian Loome's Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World, started to make them in 1878, he retired in 1899.

The successor company, John Manger and Sons, London, was in operation during the early 20th century but did not reach the same level of quality as the earliest.

C. H. Marguerat – Manufacture d'Oiseaux Chantant, Avenue de la Gare des Eux Vives 18, Genève – is the best known of the three, though their movements are not always marked.

[12] All these firms bear in common the using of the Bontems type going-barrel movement contained inside generally beautifully crafted cases in various materials which incorporated, with relative frequency, a timepiece during the interwar period (1920s and 1930s).

Eschle products were sold cheaply in souvenir shops in the Black Forest and their movements had the key for winding screwed onto the barrel arbor.

[13] Nevertheless, the only company of the twentieth century to dominate the manufacture of bird boxes for more than 50 years with an output exceeding all others put together, was certainly the prolific firm of Karl Griesbaum (1872–1941).

During the course of its lifetime the cases were supplied to them in a variety of over thirty different styles, some based on previous models by Rochat, Bruguier, etc., while others displayed novelty designs not seen before.

Within all these cases there was only one song and one type of movement available, but this mechanism (closely modelled on the Bontems pattern) was offered in three build qualities which were first introduced between 1922 and 1925.

[14] Following the cessation of activity in 1988, the contents of the Griesbaum workshops were purchased by Siegfried Wendel who moved the production to Rüdesheim am Rhein (Germany) setting up MMM (Mechanische Musikwerke Manufaktur) GmbH in 1990.

A company by the name of Frères Rochat was established in 2010 in Switzerland and retook, after 125 years since its interruption around 1885, the fabrication of both the fusee-driven movement and the bird's head motions.