Paris' Incredible Temple To Science

[Music] you know compared to their friends across the channel sometimes I think the French get a bit of the short end of the stick when talking about scientific and industrial history if you take a look though as you will hear today at the Museum at the a in Paris I hope you'll agree with me that the French have plenty to be proud of and clearly we're very innovative the Museu arts at mithya is home to an amazing collection of scientific instruments machines models early machine tools and so much more born and revolution it's long history and role as a teaching institution repeatedly put at the center of important moments in science and industry and it has the oldest industrial and technological collection in the world we'll take a look inside it some of the spectacular objects in the collections and the stories behind them the museo de artes at metier literally translated the Museum of arts and crafts sits in Paris's third district right at the city center now I know what you're thinking if you're a Yank like me and you hear arts and crafts you're thinking maybe something you did as a kid I think a more accurate translation for english-speaking ears would be Industrial Arts and trades but that doesn't even entirely do it justice calling what we see today a museum is fair but it's really so much more when it was originally found that it wasn't a museum at all yeah but we're getting a little ahead of ourselves the French Revolution is a vast complicated subject but that's not gonna stop me from grossly simplifying it as the monarchy fell to an uprising of the people there was an urgency to move away from the old ways the Enlightenment had given the people a sense that maybe there were new possibilities to how to run their lives and the two primary ruling classes in the way the monarchy and the church had to go the King had an unfortunate parting of ways with his head and the church suffered greatly as well long seen as a source of corruption they were kicked out of their positions of power and had to forfeit their buildings and land many were executed for their abuses the people who came to power next were keen to advance science and reason and new ways of thinking wherever they could very conveniently this beautiful medieval monastery was suddenly going unused and it was an opportunity to use it for France's new premier Institute for science and industrial learning from all of our France and even the world scientific instruments drawings models and full-size machines of every kind were brought together to educate and lead France to a more industrialized and prosperous future France was indeed lagging Britain in the most important industry textiles the first industry to be widely industrialised so this was a matter of great national importance France had long enjoyed a very noteworthy community of scientists of all kinds astronomers navigators physicists agricultural scientists and more additionally skilled artisans like clock makers glass and ceramic workers iron workers and others made France famous the world over and all that knowledge was brought here in order to serve as sort of a national scientific and industrial think tank from here could be passed on to others and distributed throughout the country because of that history this is not just a museum that was built upon objects collected for the purposes of creating a museum for our Museum that's sprung from an incredibly rich collection that already existed from an institution designed for learning and teaching and it got its start in 1794 so you could only imagine how rich the collections are parts of the museum are in portions of the original Church completed as far back it's 11:35 to put 11:35 into perspective it'd be 300 years before Leonardo da Vinci would be born the same 300 years before Gutenberg would start printing books almost 650 years before the United States would declare independence and almost 740 years before we'd start terrifying children with the coming of the robot revolution the museum's collections are vast and there's no way to give a comprehensive overview in a reasonable amount of time so I'm going to focus on a few of my favorite objects and tell some of their stories when you first come into the collections you're in what's essentially the Attic I don't think this is some of the oldest parts but these huge wooden beams have to be at least a few hundred years old this area the museum is the scientific instruments collection which is surely one of the finest I've seen everything here is first-class it's my understanding that many of the instruments were acquired during the revolution from the nobility which I could only imagine was an awkward conversation knock knock we hey I understand you some really cool scientific instrument that we'd love to have in our collections well yes I have some of the finest I mean see it'd be real shame if some of those things got lost you know like if something terrible happened to you oh these dusty old things sure backup your wagon and I'll help you load them [Music] in the scientific instruments the highlight for me are these mechanical calculators they were invented by the brilliant French mathematician physicist and inventor Blaise Pascal his father was a tax collector who had to manually do a lot of math and at 20 pascal set out to make a machine to simplify his dad's job and after fifty prototypes in three years of work he showed his calculators to the public the very first mechanical calculator in the world Pascal had figured out how to do something completely new and then to mechanism which could automatically carry to the next column when necessary as you added or subtracted amazingly this was in 1645 for his efforts he was awarded a prize from the king in the equivalent of a very rare patent over the next ten years he would make twenty of them only nine are known to survive with four of them being displayed right here plus a clone made by somebody else today I'm not going to spend too much time talking about this cabinet other than to say this is probably the most important few bits of metal and glass you've ever seen the very first metre kilogram and leader the distance weight and liquid measurement of almost everything around you can be traced directly back to these items even if you measure in imperial units if you watched my first video which you totally should you might have an idea why these are so important I'm an odd just standing in front of them I mean the whole world has organized itself around these bits of metal and glass I have an upcoming video which will tell the astounding story of how these came to be Lavoisier was a brilliant chemist and is widely considered to be the father of modern chemistry his accomplishments are too long to list here in totality but you might have heard about his discoveries oxygen or hydrogen or that he figured out water is composed these gases or how oxygen is an important component in combustion or that he took the first stab at making something like a periodic table or possibly is landmark achievement showing how though matter may change former shape but its mass is always conserved this completely changed how chemistry was understood and turned it into a quantitative science he used this crazy solar furnace because it would generate huge amounts of heat with no contamination from combustion gases he made a diamond burst into flames and recorded the weight of the glass container did not change by the same process he determined diamonds were made of the same thing as charcoal carbon he was way ahead in fashion as well he worked with the best craftsmen of the day to construct extremely high-quality lab wear and instruments and here in the museum you can see some of the instruments to use in some of his most important experiments like these gas honours used to prove mass conservation Lavoisier was part of the French nobility and involved in a tax farming company to collect taxes on behalf of the king this netted him the funds to help him do his work but did not make him very popular with some even though he was working to try and make taxes more fair for the peasants but he also used his money as a philanthropist and spent a great deal of his time and knowledge on researching public health issues from trying to improve street lighting or how to purify public drinking water or even improve conditions in prisons he also pushed for public science education and put his money where his mouth was by funding a local high school focused on science education and it's still going today he also worked to improve the quality of tobacco when accounting by scientifically altering the tobacco and introducing a strict chain of custody through the sales despite this improving the system it was deeply unpopular with those who profited by cheating which was just about everybody by all accounts he was happily married to his also very gifted wife Marie Ann she was his laboratory companion making drawings and meticulously recording experiments but perhaps most importantly she was fluent in several languages and could translate his results into English and the English works of other scientists into French she's known to have a full understanding of the science involved and when translating would make footnotes of the mistakes other scientists made because Lavoisier was part of the nobility involved in text collecting on behalf of the King and also what appeared to be altering tobacco this put him squarely in the sights of a dark paranoid period of the French Revolution called the terror when anyone with the slightest connection to the deposed King was highly suspect there were also personal grudges to be settled from those whose shoddy scientific theories Lavoisier discredited and in 1793 he was arrested with all tax collectors and after a one-day trial declared guilty and Lavoisier at the age of fifty was guillotine and his body thrown into a common grave Marie Ann's father was convicted at the same crime and killed the same day government confiscated the vasya's money and property and Marie Ann was forced into bankruptcy [Music] during the Revolution one of his chemistry students fled to America there he founded what is now the giant multi-billion dollar Chemical Company we know as DuPont in 1956 the DuPont company acquired about 500 pieces of Lavoisier as lab equipment and donated it here to the museum where we see it today I mentioned earlier this museum has models in it I want to stress that these models were not created for the museum but rather as teaching devices and later historical models for the students who came through here and some of them are hundreds of years old and some of these models had profound influences now my apologies to the science historian James Burke the BBC wants a fortune to license that clip in which James gives most the following information well I can't do it justice allow me to humbly in poorly paraphrase in 1725 there was a silk worker in the French city of lyon Bastille Bhushan his father worked on organs and some of them had barrels with control pins sort of like a music box for automated control the organ this idea came from trip hammers long before that the placement of the pins for controlling the organ was determined by a piece of paper Bushnell realized the paper itself can be used as a control mechanism if he applied it to weaving machines directly because asian-inspired fabrics with complicated patterns were all the rage so automated weaving machines made a ton of sense at the time the job of controlling the patterns the loom was done by children and you can imagine the problems with that so Bouchon devised a loom which the holes in the paper could allow pins to be pushed through her blocked which then when triggered different threads to lift and create the patterns line by line but the paper tore and it was difficult to use and so the idea was abandoned but later picked up by another Frenchman fell call who improved the idea by replacing the paper with cards which could be much better position it wouldn't tear so easily neither these models were fully automated though and it still required a lot of manual work then in 1750 another Frenchman VUCA saw one of the greatest machine makers of all time automated the entire process he was then inspector for silk factories in his version put the control mechanism on a drum instead of using cards this would be automatically advanced in addition to automating the rest of the weeding process thus greatly speeding up everything with a lot less human labour well when the workers got wind he was automated everything they feared for their jobs and he was pelted with rocks and practically a riot broke out so he retaliated by building a fully automatic loom driven by a donkey and his machine is beautiful just look at it for 1750 this is a fantastic marvel of mechanical engineering the patterns he was able to make are beautiful but because the drum could only have so many rows it limited the complexity of the patterns in the end the workers won and eventually bukas all ins machines were moved here to Museum where they sat then over 50 years later in 1802 Napoleon placed a large order for silk from Leon which couldn't be met without automation another Frenchman came here to the museum study the models and put Falcons cars together with VUCA songs automation and for that we know the Machine by his name the jacquard loom and wow what a success that was suddenly complex patterns were cheap and easy to make which completely changed the textile industry well not in France because during the revolution fancy patterns were too stained but in England this was picked up and soon they were everywhere printing Paisley and other patterns far faster and cheaper than ever before later an American would take this punch cart idea apply it to electromechanical counting machines used to process the 1880 census and that company would later become the core of the company we now know as IBM in the next video in our visit to the museum it ta will cover more French innovation in Science and Industry there's more amazing objects and stories to come I can't wait to share them with you I'll see you next time [Applause] [Music] [Music] in the video I talk about Blaise Pascal's mechanical calculator without really getting the details of how it works over the mechanical computing channel is a great video on the internals and how each part worked and how to do all the operations and the video is really well done if you have any interest in learning more I highly suggest you check it out something curious is back then the French monetary system was not decimal and not everything worked out to unit 210 which must have made the math even more frustrating considering Pascal had nothing to look at for inspiration it's really incredible how he put this together in the mid 1600s I want to add a little more to the story of Lavoisier particularly Marie Anne there's some debate as to how much she was an assistant versus a collaborator she was also a trained painter and many of the drawings we saw earlier were hers these came from the groundbreaking book Lavoisier published considered to be the first real chemistry textbook ever after Lavoisier is death she was eventually able to recover all of his lab notebooks and along with his contemporaries published a compilation of his papers on the new discoveries in chemistry the first draft reportedly had a bitter preface attacking those who killed him but it was cut out before publication she eventually remarried briefly but always kept Lavoisier 'he's last name showing her undying devotion to him she died suddenly in Paris at the age of 78 so a citizen or collaborator I think the latter you

Channel: Machine Thinking

Views: 242,827

Keywords: paris, museum, arts and crafts, lathe, meter, lavoisier, french revolution, milling, machinist, Museum of Arts and Crafts, Musée des Arts et Métiers, jacquard, loom, weaving, science, metric system, pascal, pascaline, history, home shop, home machining, model engineering, steam engine, engine, engineering, train, trains

Id: waEqmfH7z2Y

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2018