The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris is a trove of cunning inventions
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
E.g. in another video he explains how to get a perfectly plan surface from scratch: Rubbing two somewhat flat surfaces together until they are smooth enough does not work, you might end up with a subtly concave/convex combination. But do that with three surfaces and the result can only be perfectly flat, though it will take quite some time.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEqmfH7z2Y - Paris' Temple To Science - Part I
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA - The 1751 Machine that Made Everything
Our equivalent museum here in Sydney is the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) / Powerhouse Museum[0] which is currently in a state of transition as a political football, unfortunately. Australia seems to have largely given up on creative industry and industrial education.
I can also recommend http://507movements.com/
Similar to that museum (in obscurity and interest, if not in beauty) is the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Mercer collected tools & objects that were hand-made, before the industrial revolution.
It's a huge, poured-concrete (!) building, full of an amazing variety of objects. Small rooms contain dozens of things such as hand drills, ladies' hair-combs, etc.
This photo gives something of an idea: https://www.mercermuseum.org/exhibits/mercer-museum-exhibits...
I thought the collection was interesting, but his whole life seemed kind of one long vacation where he tried to learn a lot of different things and achieved nothing in particular.
Dude was a collector of art and old tools, sold his own art, was the architect for his own buildings, and wrote several books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chapman_Mercer
Most people (including most scientists, artists, writers, businesspeople, etc.) never “achieve something in particular” by this kind of standard.
Certainly plenty of “idle rich” do significantly less socially beneficial work than Mercer. If you start looking around at the rich more generally (e.g. people whose names are on university buildings) a substantial proportion were crooks of one type or another.
There's a gallery of looms, which is immensely confusing until you realise that "métier" is also the word for loom.
Appropriately enough, it's halfway between Du Pain et des Idées and the Experimental Cocktail Club, both of which are also worth a visit.
"Arts and Crafts", at least in modern American English has a very different meaning, and would make people expect to find the kinds of things that are sold on Etsy.
EDIT: I'm not sure why you would be surprised to find looms there, even aside from the double meaning. I believe machinery for the production of textiles were among the earliest triumphs of the industrial revolution and the Jacquard loom (invented in France) was the first known programmable machine.
As an adult, I appreciate so much more of the collection, even the furniture and household appliances that seemed utterly boring to my younger self. They tell a story of everyday life for the people who used them, and the design and manufacturing capability of the industry that produced them.
Out in the Village, there's a weaving shop with several treadle-operated looms, and one spectacular Jacquard-style machine that's so tall part of it is upstairs. They make new cards for it periodically, and run off 1800s-style textiles with "Made in 2020" and such woven into them. ;)
I need to get to Paris next!
"...and the large stationary steam engines."
The first time I recall seeing an actual functioning steam engine was at last year's Deming Logging Show. It was an early model of steam donkey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_donkey
Like a lot of kids, my son was obsessed with trains, steam shovels, dozers, etc. There's probably all sorts of reasons to not exhibit actual machinery. But it'd be cool. Maybe scale models or replicas.
I know that if I could watch a working loom, the docents would have to drag me out at closing time.
When they run the engines inside the museum, it's on compressed air rather than actual steam, for indoor humidity reasons. But outdoors, if it's running, it's because there's coal burning and water boiling not far away.
Everything in the Henry Ford is real, except the Wright Flyer replica and I think they've replaced a few floorboards in some of the buildings. But otherwise, you're walking on the same floors that Edison and Steinmetz walked on, while the generators they built spin at the other side of the room and light the bulbs overhead. The food in the café is from period recipes, and you can ride around the grounds in a Model T if you want to pay a little extra.
> the docents would have to drag me out
That's more-or-less what happened with me; they shut down the weaving shop an hour before the grounds close, and I easily had enough questions for three or four hours more. That's okay, I'll go back in spring!
You can spend at least a whole day in the museum and another in the village, so plan accordingly. Get here.
My one surprise was that it turned out the French apparently invented everything. There was even an iPod display that managed to credit the French.
it's probably going to keep happening since R&D is nowadays pretty much always the work of international teams.
I love automata - mechanical sculptures that animate in some way - and it has a whole gallery of them, including a doll that can play the harpsichord that was once owned by Marie Antoinette.
I listed it on my niche museums website here: https://www.niche-museums.com/browse/museums/30
Here is a challenge for you: try to find the location of the museum on their web site [1].
This is so, so common to museum/venue/restaurant web sites. Most of the time it takes you multiple clicks and a lot of scanning to find one piece of information that should be literally on top of every page: the location of the thing the web site is built for.
I think the problem comes from CMS or web site builder templates for businesses. This should definitely be revisited. A web site of something "visitable" in the real world should be centered around the physical location, and then the rest, not the other way around.
(P.S. if you have just guessed that the museum should be somewhere in the Arts et Métiers area of Paris, you are right)
[1] https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/visitor-information
yes I already visited the museum, it's nice, first car, first camera, lot's of cool stuff. Most displays are in French though, it could do with a little upgrade in how the collection is presented.