bearing blog: Engines and Parliament.

With Mark back from his business trip to Sweden, I realized that there was something I wanted to do with just him, not distracted by the younger children. But he had a Skype meeting at two and planned to work after that until dinner.

So in the morning we woke up the teen boys and told them they had to babysit. And we headed off together...

...to the Science Museum.

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I know, I know. The Science Museum in London is probably one of the best places in the city to take children. And I do plan to take them. It's free, after all, and relatively easy to get to.

But I wanted to take Mark to Energy Hall to see the steam engines.

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Which did not disappoint! There is a huge central room on the ground floor full of enormous machines, from the black and stained to the gleaming and polished. It is dominated by one in the center with a brightly painted wheel, several meters in diameter, grooved deeply on the outside, which once supplied the power for 1700 looms in a factory.

There is a progression of historical steam engines, from the earliest meant to draw water from mines, through Watt's and on to more advanced ones. For example, the oldest surviving "atmospheric engine" is here, used for pumping water up from mines; it gets its name because atmospheric pressure supplies the force for the return stroke, as cold water is injected into the steam chamber to condense the steam rapidly and create a vacuum.

Each engine is accompanied by a well-design touch screen which includes a careful animation of the operation of the engine, so you can see exactly how each part of the cycle worked, while standing in front of the engine itself and able to see all its parts. It's one of the best-designed galleries I have ever seen.

I was so busy enjoying it that I forgot to take pictures. Mark and I moved from engine to engine, sometimes studying them, sometimes just enjoying them.

We laughed at an apologetic description: "These machines may look crude, but in fact they were among the most advanced technologies of their day." Crude? How could they look crude? They are beautiful. And they are amazing, when you pause for just a moment and think about the constraints upon them when they were made. I see nothing crude about them. They had to drill smooth, straight bores through narrow cylinders that were meters long, for the pistons. They had to make pressure vessels out of metal that was not steel. They had to invent the machines that made the machines.

I was very taken by a description of how the designers of one very popular sort of engine for factories supplied to their customers only the blueprints, so to speak, and a professional engine erector to oversee the work; it was up to the owner of the new engine to obtain local laborers and even to source parts. I had no idea that the economy of engine-installation had been so decentralized. But the expertise must have been in such high demand then, with comparably few designers and so many new machines needed. How could it have been any other way?

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"Clockmaker's museum," read Mark off the museum directory, but I said, "No, no, we have to go through 'Making the Modern World,' that is why I brought you here. Besides the steam engines, I mean."

And... in a series of displays that were lit from beneath, good for drama, not for photography...

A Cooke and Wheatstone Telegraph!

Davy's safety lantern with its wire mantle! (On the right.) Lister's compound microscope—that is, Lister the surgeon's dad's microscope. And that spindly thing second from left? Faraday's magnet and coil. Faraday's!

Look! A Jacquard punchcard loom! I ran around it and halfway up a staircase so I could get a good look at the cards.

The original pilot Bessemer converter! Not a copy. Not one in a later factory from Bessemer's design. Bessemer's own kettle from which the very first cast of mass-produced steel was poured:

"This is where it came from," Mark said in real awe. And then, in a case next to (oddly enough; but it was at about the same time) Elias Howe's sewing machine:

James Joule's calorimeter!

I may have teared up slightly.

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There were many other artifacts, too many to photograph. Roentgen's X-ray apparatus is there, for example. And here is Bragg's X-ray spectrometer:

Having spent time in the company of modern ones, I was charmed by the wooden supports and nearly struck dumb by the necessity of obtaining parts for it from a machine shop.

Here is Watson and Crick's DNA model, reconstructed from some replica and some original parts (particularly the metal plates that represent cyclics) as they had built it to show physically the three-dimensional structure of the double helix:

"It's made of ring stands," I pointed out to Mark.

Along the sides of the gallery are a collection of technological artifacts from everyday life: porcelains and plastics, wood and textile and metal, the materials and tools and machines that surrounded ordinary people in what must have seemed ordinary times. I took a picture of a breast pump, with a tulip-shaped glass bell that fitted to a brass piston:

We finished out the gallery, hung with airplanes ("I am always amazed those old metal prop planes could fly," said Mark, "the early ones are light like gliders and the later ones had jet engines and better metal, but these middle ones I cannot believe could get off the ground") and cars; penicillin, thalidomide, modern dentist's drills, anesthetics, an early MRI machine, a Cray-1 supercomputer.

There was so much in that one gallery alone, I could come back and spend the same amount of time again, and still not see all I wanted.

That's good, because I really should, you know, bring the kids here.

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Upstairs we went to the Clockmakers' Museum. Much of what they have here is similar to the smaller, concise gallery in the British Museum, but there was one historical piece I made a beeline for: Harrison's "H5" marine clock.

We marveled at the tiny, beautiful watches. I honestly had had no idea they could make watches that small that early.

Everything was really beautiful. The worksmanship, top notch. But there was a bit of the interpretation displayed that issued a sort of caveat. The English clockmakers had refused to accept that their customers wanted more affordable goods, with less-than-top-quality (but still functional) construction, and foreign-made affordable goods put many of them out of business.

One of my FB friends, on seeing the photo of the old cash register from the British Museum that I shared a couple of days ago, commented "I wish they made ordinary things this beautiful today."

Beauty can be made at any price, I believe; but the nature of economics is such that if you will not sell people the thing they want at the price they can pay, someone else will.

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We had to go, so that we would have time for lunch before Mark's Skype meeting. On the way out I took some pictures in the first gallery, Energy Hall.

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When we got back, I queried the children and settled upon walking in for a tour of Parliament. My daughter frowned and said, "I don't like tours. Tours aren't fun." I have limited patience for making eleven-year-olds do things they don't want to do, especially when I am on vacation, and don't have help from a spouse (remember, Mark had telecommuting work to do), so I took the teen boys.

You aren't allowed to take photos except in a few places in Parliament. I took one in Westminster Hall.

This medieval hall was really the thing I came to see, the only surviving part of the earliest Parliament building, but I enjoyed the whole tour. The audio tour was really quite well done, and I enjoyed the artwork, the statuary and paintings of kings and prime ministers, the spot on the great wooden door that is splintered from being ceremonially bashed by the Queen's representative to be let in. We wondered at the system of vote-counting where the members physically sort themselves into "yes" and "no" lobbies (or, in the House of Lords, "content" and "not content" lobbies) and file past the clerk in person.

Standing in the House of Commons, walking up the steps to the top rank of green benches not so far from the ones on the other side, you sense how claustrophobically small it is, how the opposing parties face one another, and how very different in character it is from the U. S. system. My boys found it fascinating.

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We emerged from Parliament just a few minutes too late to enter Westminster Abbey as tourists, so we continued north, past the Treasury, to the Churchill War Rooms, and took the tour there. It was even more claustrophobic, but very interesting, especially the map room, and filled with small artifacts like job acceptance letters, memos to staff, and a door hung with dozens of keys and their handwritten tags. There is a Churchill Museum that is part of it, with interactive displays on the life of the prime minister, but we skipped that for lack of time and explored the underground government bunker only, with the aid of the audio tour. I was pleased by the heavy sculptured telephones, some of which could be switched from "Normal" to "Scrambled," and by the voice interviews coming through on the audio tour with women who had worked as typists and switchboard operators, never talking to their families about exactly what it is they did at their jobs in "an office" until after the war.

We reunited the family at dinner time and headed off to an Indian restaurant for a feast of papadum ("This minted chutney tastes like key lime yogurt." It did), and onion bhaji and tiny samosas and chicken pakora, and lamb vindaloo and tandoori chicken and dal and sag paneer. The little children had fish fingers and fries. Our waiter chatted with us for a long time about different things to see in London, asking about where we came from, and when Mark asked where he liked to eat, admitted that his favorite food was made in his own kitchen.

Back at the apartment, we dropped off the kids and headed to another pub. Just one pint for me, thanks; I was nearly exhausted. We sat for quite a while, looking around at the interior, on a leather (or leather-like) banquette seat that ran around the back of the pub next to the fireplace.

"No restaurant at home is such a welcoming place to imagine meeting a friend for a beer," said Mark.

"It's the materials," I said, "they're so much warmer than any restaurant or bar." The paneling was a dark polished wood, the floor was Oriental-carpeted, the fireplace set around with colorful tile, the round, wooden tables were crowded closely together in this back room, a little randomly as if they'd been left behind by a large group of friends who had moved them closer and pulled up their chairs, squeezing into the space. The walls were a mass of framed photographs (the sort signed by actors, but the effect was of a wall of family portraits) and theater posters. A staircase with a carpet runner and a wide polished bannister went up and around a corner. A television was on, and music played, but not so loud as to squelch a conversation.

I was too tired for another pint, but not too tired for a meandering walk through Seven Dials and Chinatown. I'm amazed at how dense the small boutiques are, there's no such thing it seems as an alley that goes behind things; everything is full of storefronts. The energy of people and crowds are everywhere. You can just walk and walk and take it all in for hours.

Back to the apartment, and a collapse.

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