Musée des Arts et Métiers

 

I could write for hours on a few of the collections of the museum, so I will attempt to keep this shorter. The first major thing I will cover is the transportation collection, specifically the Cugnot steam cart. While we saw a 70% replica while in Turin at the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile, on the top floor at the start of the tour, after doing a little extra digging on the Paris museum’s website I have found that this one was apparently entered into the collection in 1799, which would mean it might be the first one (despite the story told by our Italian guide about it crashing, seeing as it’s intact and not partially embedded in a building.) A few other highlights were a standard American Ford Model T, a scale model of a drive system from an old paddlewheel ship, and my personal favorite, a velodrome bicycle from 1995 that looked like a banana that grew wheels.

In the mechanics section there were many examples of historical machine tools, like a tiny shaper, a machine that essentially rips a strip of metal off a bigger plate to reduce thickness quickly, a few tiny lathes and mills, a single point threading machine, power hammers, a file cutting machine, and what appeared to be a scale model of a wagon wheel workshop, with tools for shaping spokes and rim sections and a furnace for expanding the iron bands that hold the wheels together. Seeing as most of these are functional, not only is it a great example of preserving historical manufacturing techniques, it’s a hilarious workshop to build tiny versions of old objects.

While the construction collect outdated-but-historically-important and highly specialized piece of technological history was a scale model (that appeared functional) of one of the many steam powered bucket excavators from the construction of things like the suez canal, not to mention all the other scale examples of construction techniques and other (seemingly functional) miniaturized equipment.

In one of the communication areas, there were loads of early telegraph and telephone related items, and a few dozen similarly aged items, but I think my favorite out of all of them was the collection of early computers. There was the standard 1984 shaped Apple computer, some brick from IBM, and both a Texas instruments TI-xx and some Thomson models, and to my delight, two Sinclair ZX series machines and the absolute classic, the Commadore 64. While today these machines can be blown out of the water by a TI-84 plus or a mediocre smartwatch, at the time of their debut they were pretty serious machines. While the museum hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s, I personally think they stopped at a great point. As the staff rightly stated, updating to keep up with modern technology would be expensive, and stopping before the swap from cathode ray tube displays is a fitting place for a museum with original items from the 1700s.