Calf Weaners

I know. These calf weaners look exactly like medieval torture devices. Surely that is how they must feel to calf and mom. As if the being weaned isn't traumatic enough!

In no way a last-minute gift idea, but just a reminder that today is Mother’s Day.

Some of these devices are embossed with brand names. The above model is a “Daisy.”

Below, is a “Kant Suk” which I hope is somehow related to the “Calf-ateria” feed trough I once saw.

Made in China, c. 1903

Opium-smoking group, toy figures

Executioners, toy figures

Years ago, I took my nephew to visit the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. He was five years old at the time, and already a voracious and very astute consumer. He was an avid collector of action figures (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage) and he possessed an impressive knowledge of the entire toy category. So it was no surprise that en route to the Intrepid, he negotiated that we begin our visit at the gift shop. I was leaving on a trip to Europe the next day, and I asked him what country, were he to travel, would he most like to visit. It took all him of three seconds to answer, “China.” Why China? “Because that’s where they make all the toys.”

Probably 70% of all toys found under the tree this Christmas were manufactured in China, but in 1901, when German linguist and sinologist, Berthold Laufer embarked upon his three-year shopping spree for the American Museum of Natural History, China was only just beginning to modernize. American museums were woefully lacking in collections pertaining to Asian cultures and Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist of the AMNH and Columbia University enlisted Laufer, to change that. As the sole member of the Jacob H. Schiff Expedition, Laufer was charged with studying the history and culture of the Chinese people and acquiring specimens representing every aspect of ordinary Chinese life, including the home, commerce, the arts, and recreation.

Laufer sent back 305 crates containing some 7,500 objects, plus books, rubbings, photos and wax cylinder recordings. The haul accounts for about half of the Chinese objects held by the museum today. In the spirit of the season, I’ve chosen some toys, games, puzzles, etc. from among the 6,500 digitized items available on the AMNH website.

I started this post quite a while back, after attending a Bard Graduate Center symposium in 2012, Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives. It was Laurel Kendall of the AMNH whose talk about Laufer's expedition in China prompted my own protracted excursion deep into the vast digital archives of the AMNH. There, you can see Laufer's own field notes along with thousands of objects you will probably never see displayed in the museum.

Box of toy insects

Toy monkey on a swing

Toy axe

Toy bow and pellets

Toy dog

Playing cards

Toy mask

European steam boat, toy

Horse drawing cart, toy

Insect kite

Fish kite

Peach of long life, kite

Two men, kite

Toy cats

Toy figure

Game ball

Magical blocks puzzle

Toy animal

Toy camel

Toy rooster

Toy monkey

Toy elephant

Toy duck

Backpedaling

What a great design for a bicycle-shipping crate! I’m pretty sure that it can also double as a caddy for enormous slices of toast or as the armature of a hoop-skirt.

The Victorian-era crate (with bicycle) was sold recently at the final auction of items from the now shuttered Pedaling History Museum. It’s yet another sad story of historic and cultural preservation gone awry in Buffalo, NY.

Lots of cyclenalia(?) to ogle at the Copake Auctions site.

Shawmut racing safety bicycle new in crate (c. 1913). Never uncrated. “New old stock,” as they say.

Some modern “crates.”

Bicycle stand, 1896

Rex bicycle, c.1898

Quintuple five man bicycle, signed "Francisco Cuevas" on frame.

Rollfast ski bike, DP Harris Co. NY.

Identified simply as "Bicycle Photograph."

What will they think of next?

Elemental Kinematics

“The Incline Plane,” “The Lever,” The Wedge.” These are the first three in William M. Clark’s series of mechanical models created in the early 1900s. According to the New York Times, Sept. 30, 1928, the collection of 160 models were displayed at the Museums of the Peaceful Arts on West 40th St. where they provided the answers to such question as “how can hundreds of pounds be lifted with a one-pound pull?” and “how can the rear wheels of automobiles run at different speeds around a corner without slippage when on the same axle?”
Each model was mounted on a 15 ¼” square panel. “Mechanical Wonderland,” as the collection was known, consisted of ten arrays of 16 panels each (four by four. With the push of a button, visitors could set the models in motion. Of those original 160 models, the 120 that remain now reside in the Boston Museum of Science. The digitized images you see here are from KMODDL (Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library), a resource of Cornell University Library for the scholarship of kinematics – the geometry of pure motion – and the history and theory of machines. 

Two of  more than 35,000 visitors to to see the collection in 1930.

There is, however, another set of these models. In 1928, before their installation at the Museums of the Peaceful Arts (which later became the New York Museum of Science and Industry), the models were on display in the boys' department of a department store. After seeing a pamphlet about the store display, John Cotton Dana, director of the Newark Museum tried to negotiate bringing the collection to New Jersey. Due to the costs involved, that never came to pass. A year later, Dana died, and noted philanthropic Newark resident, Louis Bamberger (best known for his department store and for funding the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton) commissioned a set for his home town.

A catalog published by the museum describes Clark’s motivation for creating his “dictionary of mechanical movements.” 

From his early youth Mr. Clark has been interested in machines and has always had a great desire to visualize the science of mechanics. His work of twenty years or more in perfecting the exhibit was inspired by a wish to give inventors and to all who deal in machine technique a short cut to their various ends.

Though based in part, on Henry T. Brown’s 507 Mechanical Movements (1871), Clark’s particular contribution, according to a 1954 journal essay published by the Museum, was that he managed “to condense into simple, compact, and easily operated models all the movements or combinations of movements used in mechanics.” And that by presenting the principles from the simplest movements to complex combinations of them, “the exhibit may be said to cover the period from man’s earliest use of tools other than his own hands to the present age of internal combustion engines, turbines and steam locomotives."

As of 1954, Clark’s “Mechanical Wonderland” had been on exhibition continuously and had travelled only twice. Once to the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair where it was featured as the centerpiece of Popular Science Monthly's exhibit. And once to MIT for ‘The Promotion of Engineering Education.’ From what I can gather, the models remained on display at the Newark Museum until sometime in the 1980s when the science galleries underwent renovation.

The models and museum publications with photos of the groups arrayed can be found here.