Once seen, especially in exquisite action, the ethereally beautiful 250-year-old Silver Swan automaton cannot be forgotten.
Certainly not by Mark Twain, who wrote about it in Innocents Abroad, after seeing it at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867: “I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes —watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop — watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.”
And almost assuredly not by Charles Babbage, the mercurial genius credited with inventing the computer. As a boy, Babbage visited the Mechanical Museum in London, opened in 1783 by the Silver Swan’s co-creator, the master maker of clockwork mechanisms John Joseph Merlin.
Merlin designed the complex internal workings for the Silver Swan, working alongside the famed jeweller and goldsmith James Cox.
Merlin’s museum was filled with inventions, automata and other mechanical curiosities, many of them for sale. Among them was his “gouty chair”, a forerunner of the modern wheelchair, mechanical swings, and a range of curious agglomerations of musical instruments, one of which combined a piano-forte, harpsichord, kettledrums, and a trumpet, “constructed to play together or separately with great facility”.
Merlin also invented the inline roller skate, though the two-wheeled skates were hampered by the lack of a brake. The consequences of this oversight were dramatically, if unintentionally, demonstrated by Merlin himself who attended a masquerade at Carlisle House, skating while playing the violin (as one does). Unable to change direction or stop, he caromed at speed into a costly mirror, smashing it, the violin and himself — not the best of marketing.
The Silver Swan was Merlin’s masterpiece. Cox’s delicate silver and glass work gives the body to the realistic swan. Merlin’s complex rod and gear structures in the bird’s interior gracefully animate the automaton as it stretches its body, turns its head, searches for a small fish, and then swallows it down.
For more than a hundred years, the Silver Swan has resided in a glass case at the wonderful Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, Teesdale, Co Durham. It was purchased in 1872 by the museum’s founders, John and Josephine Bowes, for £200 (£20,000 today). More than a decade ago, I saw it on my first visit to Teesdale, which we now visit several times a year. We booked a winter week in what turned out to be the aftermath of heavy snowstorms. With limited ability to do walks, we discovered the Bowes and its Silver Swan, presiding over a large upstairs room filled with paintings.
Is the euro zone drifting into recession?
A museum employee wound it and to tinkling music, the Swan executed its hypnotic performance, to oohs and ahhhs from a small audience. I’d never seen anything like it, and was astonished by its beauty and lithesome movement, despite its great age.
It turns out that the swan’s internal workings bear a marked resemblance to Babbage’s famous “difference engines”, calculating machines that could do difficult mathematical operations with precision. The late, great Irish science communicator Mary Mulvihill wrote about Babbage and explained how his engines were intended to work in 1996, back when Babbage’s name was only beginning to enter the public imagination (irishtimes.com/news/in-the-age-of-babbage-1.97746).
The 1832 model of a portion of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1 is on loan from the London Science Museum to the Bowes, as part of a fascinating exhibit on “The Magic of the Silver Swan”, celebrating the swan’s 250th birthday. Babbage retained a lifelong interest in Merlin’s work, as the Difference Engine display notes: “After Merlin’s death, Charles Babbage bought and adapted an automaton woman invented by the Silver Swan’s maker.”
The exhibit, which the Bowes terms “a celebration of automata, clockwork machines and how we can explore art through technology”, includes other captivating mechanical objects and artworks, too. It’s inspiring and thought-provoking and perfectly timed, with so much focus concentrated on AI, robots, digital sentience, and the overlaps between art and technology. I visited in September and intend a return visit before the exhibit closes on January 7th.
Yet wonderful as it is, there’s a critical absence at the exhibit’s heart: the Silver Swan itself. After 2½ centuries of performance, it’s in need of major restoration work and was disassembled and stored during the pandemic.
The Silver Swan and the Bowes need help. While some state funding has been given to this project, the Bowes needs at least £18,000 (€21,000) more and is running a crowdfunding effort (artfund.org/donate/art-happens/bring-back-the-magic-of-the-silver-swan).
Surely, this is a project that also should be close to the heart of the technology sector. Not only does the historic swan continue to inspire as a magical example of precision engineering, creativity and robotics, but it has a special link to iconic computing history, too. Some corporate support from the tech sector would not go amiss to bring the swan back to life, perhaps to inspire tomorrow’s computing geniuses.
