Musée des Arts et Métiers

We timed our picnic Thursday afternoon to end around 6 PM, which is when the Musée des Arts et Métiers begins its weekly "Nocturne," during which entry is free (just the way we like it) between 6 and 9:30 PM.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers was founded by the Abbé Grégoire (a major figure in the French Revolution) as a history of science museum and depository for new inventions. Thanks in large part to him, we saw lots of beautiful, complicated-looking, and often mysterious scientific instruments stretching back hundreds of years. The oldest pieces are held in what appears to be the attic of the building, wood beams and all.


Later in the parcours (visit path), we learned about how computers work, inspected full-sized looms, gained respect for the technological leaps it took to mass produce glass bottles, and practiced construction techniques. My favorite pieces both had what looked like piano keyboards: the first was an 1819 monochord (an actual monochord! that divides a string to produce different intervals/pitches, proving the physical principles on which all music is based) and the second was an early typewriter that assigned a different letter to each key (assuming that piano skills would translate to typing).


Hopefully you don't get the impression that this was boring, because it really wasn't. Quite the contrary, the incredible quantity of stuff was pretty overwhelming, so much so we would have been happy dividing our visit into several. Our only complaint was that there weren't enough interactive exhibits. The two things we enjoyed most were getting to "code" a hard drive through manual "magnetic impulse" to form binary code which we then translated into numbers; and getting to play with an abacus. We are huge dorks.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers saves the absolute best for absolute last. When you round the last turn in the parcours, you find yourself in the former Priory of St. Martin-des-Champs, a renovated, centuries-old Gothic church, now filled with the "large-format" works of the museum:


Planes, cars, trucks, a scale model of the Statue of Liberty, yeah, they've got that. Foucault's Pendulum? Check.

Foucault's Pendulum! It's real! It's fantastic! And so is this museum. Go to there.