Pierre Jaquet-Droz was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He was born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Principality of Neuchâtel, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built animated dolls known as automata to help his firm sell watches and mechanical caged songbirds.

La Chaux-de-Fonds is a Swiss city in the canton of Neuchâtel. It is located in the Jura mountains at an altitude of 1000 m, a few kilometres south of the French border. After Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg it is the fifth largest city in the Romandie, the French-speaking part of the country, with a population of 36,915.