If you can't visit but are interested in the topic and the beginning of the industrial revolution in general, the YouTube channel "Machine Thinking" has a video about this[1][2] and related topics.
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.
Nice channel, thanks for sharing. Great presenter, too: The Fresh Revolution is a vast and complicated subject, but that's not going to stop me from grossly simplifying it.
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.
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.
I had very mixed feelings visiting the Mercer Museum. It's basically this guy who was obsessed with castles his whole life and always wanted to live in one, backpacked around Europe for 8 (!!) years after graduating college, and came back to use his rich aunt's money to build himself a castle and live in it.
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.
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.
Yes, I don't think they should have attempted a literal translation and instead described it as a museum of science and technology (as they do in the article).
"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.
I live just a few miles from the Henry Ford Museum, and its outdoor section, Greenfield Village. It sounds like exactly the same sort of place. As a kid, I spent a lot of time around the tractors and trains, and the large stationary steam engines. (There's one fixed in place so you can climb into the cylinder through the valve opening, if you're so inclined.)
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. ;)
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.
Why on earth would you not exhibit actual machinery? It's plenty strong -- just keep it painted and greased so it doesn't rust -- and it's so much cooler. They rebuild the boilers in the trains every few years, using period tools and techniques so the "new" one is just like the old.
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.
I wasn't surprised to find looms. My point is that the descriptions on the exhibits were confusing, because at first I interpreted them as saying "steam-powered crafts were first invented in Lyon in 1782" or whatever.
Anyway, the museum is dope. They've got looms, tools, scientific instruments, old computers, a rocket engine, Foucault's pendulum, vignettes of dams, Lavoisier's laboratory, all sorts really.
Appropriately enough, it's halfway between Du Pain et des Idées and the Experimental Cocktail Club, both of which are also worth a visit.
it's something you can find on wikipedia as well. Every local wikipedia attributes the original inventor of big things ( planes, cinema , internet...and even general relativity ( see poincarré)) to someone of its own nationality.
it's probably going to keep happening since R&D is nowadays pretty much always the work of international teams.
Visited this a few months ago - it's an absolute gem.
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.
They even have a decimal clock dated from the French revolution: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. Total of 100k seconds/day, making seconds a bit shorter. Was largely ignored, only lasted a few years.
The computer section has a ZX81, a ZX Spectrum, an Oric Atmos, and a Commodore 64 on display if memory serves me right. All my childhood computers, feels weird seeing them in a museum. My kids were amazed by the first calculators made of paper and cardboard.
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)
It is not that I am so old, but I was there with my kid some time ago (FYI it is free the 1st sunday of every month :). Kid asks: "Daddy what is it?". Me: "Ahem kid, this is a telephone". Basically the POTS phone we had at home as I was myself a kid. Now it is in a museum.
The old huge IBM stuff they have is fascinating but I really was amazed by the Cray. What a cool weird design piece. They totally had some Bauhaus type designer work on the housing.
I really hate such titles "The Best insert (subject) You Never (verb) in (location)".
especially since it's a blanket statement, which (a) shames people who haven't done it, and (b) makes people who did do it feel ignored. Common, you write for a living? don't use such tropes then.
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.
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