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O.T. Museum of Arts et Metiers, Paris

I went to the rebuilt Museum of Arts et Metiers yesterday, and it was a great better than it was when I last went through it twenty years ago - good displays, well laid out and quite a bit of explanatory material - less in English than in French, but the French did invent chauvenism.

It still fails to do justice to Vaucasson's sliding lathe from 1751, which can claim to the ancestor of all modern lathes, mainly by virtue of its wonderful lead screw - the Scientific American article on the subject (from the early 1980's - IIRR) was pretty explicit on that claim, but no French museum keeper is going to pay any attention to that.

And there is a Bruget(?) biplane which - IIRR - held the world altitude record for a while, for which I could find any description at all. It was just hanging there in the chapel, next to Bleriot's cross-channel monplane from 1909, which was well-documented (as if it needed documentation).

The museum has also got Joseph Cuget's steam-driven "Fardier" from 1770

- for pulling artillery around - with a video clip recording the consequences of designing a self-powered vehicle without a braking system ... and a reassembly of Lavoisier's orignal laboratory. Great stuff, well-displayed.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen (but in Paris for a day or two)
Reply to
bill.sloman
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schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

Even greater stuff in the Crazy Horse.

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Thanks, Frank.
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Reply to
Frank Bemelman

:o)))

--DF

Reply to
Deefoo

They used to have a display on an early electric locomotive system. For some reason the inventor had a grudge against electric motors. It had power taken to the loco with overhead wires and pantographs but the electricity was used to boil water and thereafter it was a steam engine. Do they still have it? What was it called?

Reply to
John McMillan

I visited it last November, when I was in Paris for a few days. Another interesting exhibit is a Cray 2.

The Curie Museum, near the Pantheon, is also worth a visit. The Pantheon has the original Foucault pendulum, BTW.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

Just accessing that site was a violation of university policy, I love it. To heck with London this summer!

Steve Roberts

Reply to
osr

Yes, it's pretty good, and not that expensive. I was there about 6 weeks ago. It's a little short on English, but better than many other museums in France. The "Computing" section was a little disorganised, but it does have a Cray, a ZX81 and a C64 amongst others, including the dreaded French Minitel.

Barry Lennox

Reply to
Barry Lennox

Thanks, haven't been there yet.

Visited La Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie

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some years ago

The Musée de Minéralogie in the school of mines

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is worth a visit and then there's The Musée de l'érotisme
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also

Reply to
richard mullens

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