In which we visit the Musee des Arts et Metiers

Note: I'm very far behind in this blog, so I'm committing to writing at least one post each morning that Cherry has school (MTTF). Hopefully that will catch me up relatively quickly.

Last weekend was the first weekend in September, so many of the national museums were free on Sunday. Since I am of Dutch heritage, this meant that, of course, we had to take advantage of this. Unfortunately, most of the museums that were free were art museums, which we just weren't in the mood for, and the one on the list that we really wanted to go to is in the process of being moved to a new building, in Marseilles, 800 km away. We started poking around on the websites of various museums that we wanted to go to at some point, hoping that we'd find one that was free that day. Finally, Blaise discovered that the Musee des Arts et Metiers was free.

Though arts et metiers translates roughly as arts and crafts, a more accurate translation might be as invention and industry. When we arrived, there was no sign telling us that the museum was free that day (generally there is) and so we had to confirm that it was at the information desk. I'm not sure whether they would have sent us in for free had we not known that it was free or not, since they bothered to give us tickets which were then scanned by the ticket taker on the way upstairs.

We saw balances, weights, telescopes, ancient calculators. Models of looms for making jacquard silk and paper mills. A 20 year old Cray super computer. (That one was a bit odd. There was all this really old stuff, and then a Cray, circa 1985.) A scale model of demonstrating the Bessemer process for making steel. The skeletons of model buildings. More types of gears than I realized there were in existence, and many of them could be watched in action by holding down a button. Bleriot's airplane. And a big collection of animated toys, which, unfortunately, are only turned on a few times a month.