The Bird Goes Back In

An oval box, about three inches long, was put on a table in Edinburgh. Its lid opened and a brightly feathered bird appeared. It fluttered its wings, opened its beak and gave four kinds of warbling before disappearing into the box. The lid closed after it.

That was David Brewster’s description of a bird exhibited by the mechanician Maillardet, recalled in Letters on Natural Magic. The bird was the size of a hummingbird. Brewster explained that there was too little room for a collection of pipes to supply its varied notes: a single tube and a moving piston did the work instead. The bird’s retreat was as much part of the demonstration as its arrival. When it had finished, the small object on the table concealed its performer again.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, members of the Bruguier family in Geneva were making such performances in boxes decorated with flowers, mountain landscapes and finely engraved metal. A slide on the front started the action. Beneath the feathers, different pieces of machinery had to produce a voice, turn a head, move wings and return the bird through its opening without trapping it beneath the closing lid.

A place for tobacco, and a place for a bird

One surviving example, signed Charles Bruguier and numbered 536, is about ten centimetres wide. Its silver case is gilded and covered with engraving and painted enamel. The oval lid carries an Alpine landscape. With the lid raised, a green bird stands above a pierced metal grille; a compartment at the back opens separately for snuff, the powdered tobacco taken through the nose.

The owner could take tobacco from one compartment and release the bird from the other. The front slide started a performance while keeping most of its machinery hidden beneath the decorated surface.

These boxes belonged to a craft that brought several specialisms into a small space. A maker of mechanisms needed a case that allowed the bird and its linkages to move freely. An enamel painter could make the closed lid a landscape in miniature. Engravers cut decoration into the sides and base. The feathers gave a metal body the surface of an animal, while the grille covered the workings through which that body emerged.

The ornament did not have to disappear when the mechanism started. Bruguier boxes could have flowers painted on the underside of the lid as well as a landscape outside it. Opening the cover changed the setting around the bird.

Air for a voice

The owner first wound a spring with a key. In signed Bruguier mechanisms, a fine chain and a shaped drum called a fusee helped compensate for the spring’s changing pull as it unwound. The spring supplied the energy; the machinery still had to distribute that energy between pumping, sound and movement.

Bellows supplied air to a whistle. A piston sliding within the sound-producing tube changed its effective length and therefore its pitch. A valve controlled the flow of air, allowing the call to break into phrases instead of continuing as one unbroken note. The song was made afresh by moving parts and air each time the mechanism ran.

The timing lay in a set of cams: rotating pieces whose shaped edges lifted and released small followers. A smooth stretch of edge could hold a part in place; a rise or dip could move it. Several profiles turning together could prescribe different actions at the same moment.

Christie’s description of one Charles Bruguier movement records eight cams controlling both the automaton and its song. Another signed example combines stacked cams, rectangular bellows and a chain fusee with a bird that turns its head, flaps its wings, moves its tail and opens its beak. The visible gestures and the changing call followed the same mechanical timetable.

Separate voices

A singing bird was not simply a miniature music box with feathers added. A music-box cylinder could pluck tuned metal teeth to make a melody; the bird’s voice came from air passing through a whistle. Some elaborate objects carried both systems, together with a watch. They required separate mechanisms even when they occupied the same case.

Reuge, which still makes mechanical birds, describes this pneumatic principle through bellows, air valves, pistons and cam profiles. Its present-day construction continues the craft with modern materials and methods; the historical examples have their own arrangements.

A closer look · 1:36 · Visual demonstration · captions unavailable

Winding the bird

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More than one Charles

Charles-Abraham Bruguier, born in 1788, came from a clockmaking family. He spent several years in London before returning to Geneva. His son, born in London in 1818, was also named Charles-Abraham and also made bird mechanisms. By the 1840s the younger man had a separate professional identity. A signature reading simply Charles Bruguier cannot always distinguish their work.

The family included another specialist whose trade used a different way of storing a musical sequence. Jacqueline, the elder Charles’s daughter, pinned music-box cylinders. Tiny projections on a rotating cylinder determine when the musical mechanism plays its notes. Her occupation appears in Sotheby’s account of the family, which draws on the research of the specialist Sharon Bailly.

Jacqueline married Jacques Bruguier in 1853. Despite the shared surname, Jacques was the elder Charles’s son-in-law. He was already working with him on singing-bird movements by 1852. Older catalogue descriptions have sometimes turned the family into a simpler succession of father and two sons, losing both the marriage and Jacqueline’s own skilled occupation.

Cylinder pins and cam profiles were distinct methods of arranging events in time. One could prescribe musical notes; the other could shape a whistle’s call and a bird’s movements. Jacqueline’s recorded occupation does not establish that she made the birds’ cam programmes. It places another skilled musical trade inside the family.

Jacques also left his own name on surviving mechanisms. A box catalogued by Sotheby’s in 2008 bears his name and a Pâquis address, and is dated around 1868. The auction house suggests a connection with the younger Charles’s workshop there. The inscription gives a more particular history than the family name alone.

After the lid closed

The box’s short performance could be repeated, but the object needed care between performances. Bellows had to hold air. The bird’s joints and the lid had to move without obstruction. A winding key could be lost; a travelling case could be replaced. Surviving boxes often retain evidence of these later stages alongside their original mechanisms.

A Bruguier example catalogued around 1850 by Museum Collection carries a label for the Geneva music-box firm B.A. Brémond and the number 1887 engraved inside its tobacco compartment. Neither tells us who first bought it. Nor does the engraving establish what happened in that year. Another box, with a movement signed and numbered 21, survives in a fitted presentation case marked Desoutter, 4 Hanover Street, London W. The Geneva bird had acquired a London address of its own.