Steve_Bamlett_blog

It was a dreary start. Rain and gloom and a memory that 69 is one year off 70, but hubby Geoff had gone to some trouble to get me a range of little birthday gifts and greetings for Joanne, Linda, Mike and Ian helped cheer the old man up. And then we remembered that the Bowes Museum was celebrating the restoration of the mechanical silver swan by hosting an exhibition of automata. Now in the Barnard Castle bookshop for  lunch and tapping this out.

The Swan itself was being worked on on the 3rd floor by clockmakers from Hexham. We found the exhibition though quite enthralling: lighter in tone than my usual fare but better for all that. Here’s the introductory plaque:

John Joseph Merlin was the horologist who devised the silver Swan and the exhibit opens with some of his more everyday work and his portrait.

But clockwork automata is not all we get. Take this arm playing music of a kind on a keyboard.

Or this mechanical phonograph nearby it.

The age of mechanical automata is celebrated too by a film based on the opera of the Masked Ball, by Verdi I think, in which humans play at being mechanical automata of humans:

Some items are useful inventions like this early mechanical wheelchair (below) which was hand-operated by a wheel mechanism on the arms.

Some had industrial applications like this early mechanical lathe.

Others were toys, which show figures in strange motion: a toymaker, an artist at their easel, and a family at home.

Others like the work of Matthew Smith, that is dotted about the Museum cross the boundary to dynamic art, a ripple machine mixing water or a machine of birds flying imitating the motion of a certain kind of wave in the sea.

Nearby is a potential energy machine looking like the most exquisite wall decoration .

And of course how could such an exhibition be complete without a singing caged bird of the more ethical mechanical variety.

Do go and see this lovely exhibition. Take your dog and walk the woodland park walk around the grounds.

So this was a happy birthday and the Pavilion Chinese restaurant tonight at Consett. Life for the young UN’s. Roll on 70 next October 24th.

With love

Steven

Xxxxxxx