🎥source: YT your-digitalbrain
“In 1773, a London clockmaker named John Joseph Merlin built a life-sized swan made of solid silver, containing two thousand parts and three independent clockwork mechanisms. Two hundred and fifty years later, it still works.
In 2008, during a restoration at the Bowes Museum, conservators found a hidden counter inside that had recorded every activation since its creation. The flowing water beneath the swan isn’t water at all: it’s twisted glass rods spinning in opposite directions, creating a perfect optical illusion.
In 1801, a nine-year-old boy named Charles Babbage visited Merlin’s workshop and became obsessed with automatons. Decades later, that same boy would design the first machine capable of calculating without human intervention — the ancestor of the modern computer.
A single object where 18th-century engineering, optical illusion, and the origin of computing all converge.”~your-digital brain
Creative ingenuity. Somethings are made to last!
