Canadian Museum of Making
A few of us went on tour of this private collection which seems to have one of every machine ever conceived. Since we’re nerdy steampunk fanatics and mechanically-minded industrial designers, we mostly wandered around with mouths agape, pointing and squeaking at each other to “lookit this one!” like Christmas morning in Disneyland.
The cool thing about it being a collection is it’s less stuffy than public museums because the invitees are usually our types who are deeply fascinated with the machines, which means we were allowed to play with them and watch them move and see how they work. For me (us) that’s the best way to learn: experimenting and finding out what really makes it tick.
The bookshelves were fantastic. Everything from engineering Tesla turbines to steam engines to playing billiards like a gentleman (complete with illustrations featuring tophats and monocles!) to bird watching to botany. I commented several times that I would just stay there and read the shelves end to end, top to bottom, forever – if I could. As much as I could easily download all the texts into my iPad, there’s just a magic to reading leather bound tomes with grease on the pages from a hundred years ago, with little notes scribbled in the margins from some machinist at some point. It just feels like it has wisdom trapped inside, you know? And you trace your finger over the gold embossed title text and can’t contain your excitement to learn all about the topic contained within.
Anyway, the photography is mediocre and really doesn’t do the place justice. I had to skip posting entire sections of the collection in photos because there really isn’t a good way of making such massive galleries.
Still, definitely check out the part one and two of the gallery I did post – about 40 photos in total.
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