Old Machines

This gallery is for machines that did their work before electronics took over. Each one is built as a working model you can run slowly, open up and change, and each comes with a long commentary on how it works, who made it and what it was used for. Nothing here is a photograph of an object in a case; you press the keys, wind the spring and turn the crank yourself.

The machines are chosen because the idea inside them is easy to see once the case is off. A vinyl record keeps sound as a wiggle in a spiral groove. A manual typewriter steps its carriage the same distance for every letter. The Enigma cipher machine turns its rotors one step on every key press, so pressing the same key five times lights five different letters. Other exhibits in the gallery follow the same pattern: a Korean water clock from 1434 that strikes a bell with falling balls, a slide rule that multiplies by adding lengths, a pendulum clock, a music box, a Morse telegraph, a rotary telephone dial, movable type and the printing press, a sewing machine, film and instant cameras, windmills and watermills, a steam locomotive and a coin-checking vending machine.

A good way to go through the gallery is in order of age. Start with the water clock and the printing press, move to the clock, the music box and the telegraph of the nineteenth century, and finish with the typewriter, the telephone dial and the cipher machine of the twentieth. Many of the machines solve the same problem in different ways: how to count, how to keep time, or how to turn a movement into a signal.

Each exhibit page ends with a list of sources, mostly museums, standards bodies and the original patents, and a short set of questions and answers.