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Silver Swan (automaton)
The Silver Swan is an automaton dating from the 18th century and housed in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Teesdale, County Durham, England. It was acquired by John Bowes, the museum's founder, from a Parisian jeweler in 1872. The swan, which is life-sized, is a clockwork-driven device that includes a music box. The swan sits in a "stream" made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves. Small silver fish can be seen "swimming" in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side and also preens itself. After a few moments the swan notices the swimming fish and bends down to catch and eat one. The swan's head then returns to the upright position and the performance, which lasts about 32 seconds, is over. To help preserve the mechanism, the swan was only operated once each day, at 2pm. The museum was closed during 2020 and 2021 so the daily display did not ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Silver Swan, Bowes Museum - Geograph
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Cox (inventor)
James Cox (c. 1723–1800) was a British jeweller, goldsmith and entrepreneurJames Cox (ca. 1723–1800): Goldsmith and Entrepreneur Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History; Roger Smit "James Cox (c. 1723-1800): A Revised Biography" ''The Burlington Magazine'', Vol. 142, No. 1167 (Jun., 2000), pp. 353-361 and the proprietor of Cox's Museum. He is now best known for creating ingenious and mechanical clocks, including |
18th-century Robots
The 18th century lasted from January 1, 1701 ( MDCCI) to December 31, 1800 ( MDCCC). During the 18th century, elements of Enlightenment thinking culminated in the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. During the century, slave trading and human trafficking expanded across the shores of the Atlantic, while declining in Russia, China, and Korea. Revolutions began to challenge the legitimacy of monarchical and aristocratic power structures, including the structures and beliefs that supported slavery. The Industrial Revolution began during mid-century, leading to radical changes in human society and the environment. Western historians have occasionally defined the 18th century otherwise for the purposes of their work. For example, the "short" 18th century may be defined as 1715–1789, denoting the period of time between the death of Louis XIV of France and the start of the French Revolution, with an emphasis on directly interconnected events. To historians who expand ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robots Of The United Kingdom
"\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visit.\n\nThis relies on voluntary compliance. Not all robots comply with the standard; email harvesters, spambots, malware and robots that scan for security vulnerabilities may even start with the portions of the website where they have been told to stay out.\n\nThe \"robots.txt\" file can be used in conjunction with sitemaps, another robot inclusion standard for websites.\n History\nThe standard was proposed by Martijn Koster, when working for Nexor in February 1994\n on the ''www-talk'' mailing list, the main communication channel for WWW-related activities at the time. Charles Stross claims to have provoked Koster to suggest robots.txt, after he wrote a badly-behaved web crawler that inadvertently caused a denial-of-service attack on Kos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Automata (mechanical)
An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/automaton Some automata, such as bellstrikers in mechanical clocks, are designed to give the illusion to the casual observer that they are operating under their own power. Since long ago, the term is commonly associated with automated puppets that resemble moving humans or animals, built to impress and/or to entertain people. Animatronics are a modern type of automata with electronics, often used for the portrayal of characters in films and in theme park attractions. Etymology The word "automaton" is the latinization of the Ancient Greek , , (neuter) "acting of one's own will". This word was first used by Homer to describe an automatic door opening, or au ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tourist Attractions In County Durham
Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tours. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism more generally, in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity only", as people "travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure and not less than 24 hours, business and other purposes". Tourism can be domestic (within the traveller's own country) or international, and international tourism has both incoming and outgoing implications on a country's balance of payments. Tourism numbers declined as a result of a strong economic slowdown (the late-2000s recession) between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, and in consequence of the outbreak of the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, but slowly recovered until the COVID-19 pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wordmark. In the days of hot metal typesetting, a logotype was one word cast as a single piece of type (e.g. "The" in ATF Garamond), as opposed to a Typographic ligature, ligature, which is two or more letters joined, but not forming a word. By extension, the term was also used for a uniquely set and arranged typeface or colophon (publishing), colophon. At the level of mass communication and in common usage, a company's logo is today often synonymous with its trademark or brand.Wheeler, Alina. ''Designing Brand Identity'' © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (page 4) Etymology Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term 'logo' used in 1937 "probably a shortening of logogram". History Numerous inv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Museum, London
The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019. Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission, although visitors are requested to make a donation if they are able. Temporary exhibitions may incur an admission fee. It is one of the five museums in the Science Museum Group. Founding and history The museum was founded in 1857 under Bennet Woodcroft from the collection of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. It included a collection of machinery which became the ''Museum of Patents'' in 1858, and the ''Patent Office Museum'' in 1863. This collection contained many of the most famous exhibits of what is now t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Innocents Abroad
''The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress'' is a travel book by American author Mark Twain. Published in 1869, it humorously chronicles what Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion" on board the chartered vessel ''Quaker City'' (formerly ) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American travelers in 1867. The five-month voyage included numerous side trips on land. The book, which sometimes appears with the subtitle "The New Pilgrim's Progress", became the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime, as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time. Analysis ''Innocents Abroad'' presents itself as an ordinary travel book based on an actual voyage in a retired Civil War ship (the ). The excursion was billed as a Holy Land expedition, with numerous stops and side trips along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, notably: * train excursion from Marseille to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition during the reign of Napoleon III and the Seco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876) and its sequel, ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1884), the latter of which has often been called the " Great American Novel". Twain also wrote ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' (1889) and '' Pudd'nhead Wilson'' (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for ''Tom Sawyer'' and ''Huckleberry Finn''. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. He later became a river ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of the world's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, gastronomy, and science. For its leading role in the arts and sciences, as well as its very early system of street lighting, in the 19th century it became known as "the City of Light". Like London, prior to the Second World War, it was also sometimes called the capital of the world. The City of Paris is the centre of the Île-de-France region, or Paris Region, with an estimated population of 12,262,544 in 2019, or about 19% of the population of France, making the region France's primate city. The Paris Region had a GDP of €739 billion ($743 billion) in 2019, which is the highest in Europe. According to the Economist Intelli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exposition Universelle (1867)
The International Exposition of 1867 (french: Exposition universelle 'art et d'industriede 1867), was the second world's fair to be held in Paris, from 1 April to 3 November 1867. A number of nations were represented at the fair. Following a decree of Emperor Napoleon III, the exposition was prepared as early as 1864, in the midst of the renovation of Paris, marking the culmination of the Second French Empire. Visitors included Tsar Alexander II of Russia, a brother of the King William and Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, Prince Metternich and Franz Josef of Austria, Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, and the Khedive of Egypt Isma'il. Conception In 1864, Napoleon III issued a decree stating that an international exposition should be held in Paris in 1867. A commission was appointed with Prince Jerome Napoleon as president, under whose direction the preliminary work began. The site chosen for the Exposition Universelle of 1867 was the Champ de Mars, the great military parade ground ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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