Today's“Museum Stories” column is the first part of the story “The Enlightenment-era automata and mechanical singing birds”, which focuses on the legendary mechanics who worked in Paris during the Enlightenment, one of the key periods in European cultural history associated with the development of scientific, philosophical and social ideas.

Great wizards of bygone centuries created technical and art masterpieces — amazing automata, mechanical figures of people and animals with carefully executed details, capable of performing dizzyingly complex movements. Many of these unique automata are presented on the museum “Collection” website in the collection “Amusing Automata”.

In the second part of this “Museum Story” you will learn about the emergence of a new, independent type of automata — mechanical singing birds (the collection section “Mechanical Birds and Singing Bird Boxes”), which gained enormous popularity in the 19th century.