Head bowed low in apology, the timeless Silver Swan continues to inspire as that enchanting example of precision engineering, creativity and robotics
Once seen, especially in exquisite action, the ethereally beautiful 250-year-old Silver Swan automaton cannot be forgotten.
And almost assuredly not by Charles Babbage, the mercurial genius credited with inventing the computer. As a boy, Babbage visited the Mechanical Museum in London, opened in 1783 by the Silver Swan’s co-creator, the master maker of clockwork mechanisms John Joseph Merlin.Merlin’s museum was filled with inventions, automata and other mechanical curiosities, many of them for sale.
The Silver Swan was Merlin’s masterpiece. Cox’s delicate silver and glass work gives the body to the realistic swan. Merlin’s complex rod and gear structures in the bird’s interior gracefully animate the automaton as it stretches its body, turns its head, searches for a small fish, and then swallows it down.
It turns out that the swan’s internal workings bear a marked resemblance to Babbage’s famous “difference engines”, calculating machines that could do difficult mathematical operations with precision.
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