Oppfinnsomme mekanismer, instrumenter og menneskene som fikk dem til å virke.
The Bruguier family’s Swiss singing-bird boxes concealed a performance beneath a painted landscape. Bellows supplied the voice and shaped metal controlled the movements; behind the familiar maker’s name were two Charleses, a son-in-law and a woman who pinned musical cylinders.
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A wheel turns and a pair of shears opens and closes, although the machine is printed on paper. A surviving Victorian zoetrope and its picture strips reveal how much of the action had to be settled before anyone spun the drum.
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Around 1900, Underwood & Underwood offered a hundred stops through Ottoman Palestine without an ocean crossing. The stereoscope supplied depth; Jesse Lyman Hurlbut’s guide told the traveller where to stand, how to look and which past to imagine.
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Around 1889, a Melbourne bookseller's music department ordered a German Symphonion. Customers paid a penny to set it playing; changing the tune meant opening the cabinet and lifting out a large steel disc.
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John Harrison spent years making large clocks for the sea. A watch made by John Jefferys helped him change direction. Inside H4, four springs and a fast-moving balance carried the experiment across the Atlantic; explaining it to other makers required another kind of work.
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Charles Weller tried to use Sholes's experimental typewriter for paid work. Between jammed letters and handwritten transcripts came a succession of promises that the machine was finally ready.
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Breguet’s one-hand pocket watch simplified the machinery and changed how customers paid for it. A large dial, a repairable movement and a quarter of the price in advance formed the bargain.
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Willgodt Odhner promised reliable arithmetic in a small machine. His instructions reveal the turns, shifts and corrections that still belonged to the person holding the crank.
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Herman Hollerith’s electrical machines helped process the 1890 United States census. At every press, a clerk still had to turn a punched card into a number—and decide what to do when the bell stayed silent.
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Mechanical magic-lantern slides made painted figures move and coloured patterns revolve. In Adelaide in 1848, Henry Kesterton's ambitious show depended on a lecturer, a limited supply of gas and an agreement that the two men remembered differently.
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David Roentgen’s cabinets could command a room with springs, music and disappearing compartments. Winning an audience with Europe’s rulers required another set of mechanisms: introductions, travelling showpieces and carefully judged flattery.
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A wooden tiger could growl, make its victim cry and play music. Taken from Tipu Sultan’s palace in 1799, it became one of London’s most popular museum exhibits, and a nuisance to readers in the next room.
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All seven fish remain after the Silver Swan has apparently swallowed one. The Bowes Museum’s bird has a concealed catch, an altered movement and a wooden understudy built to test how a silver neck should turn.
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In the 1770s, Jaquet-Droz’s mechanical boy could write a newly chosen message of up to forty characters. His makers were selling Swiss watchmaking, while giving a remarkably familiar vision of a writing assistant its human form.
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