Mechanical Magic
A life-size, clockwork automaton of a swan made of silver with glass and metal fittings
CE c.1773
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The Silver Swan
There is something undeniably captivating about the lifelike movements of the mechanical swan sat regally inside a glass display at the centre of the Art Gallery in the Bowes Museum, County Durham, England. The Silver Swan automaton was made in 1773 by the British jeweller, goldsmith and businessman James Cox and his Belgian apprentice, the inventor and horologist John-Joseph Merlin.
The swan is a truly beautiful object, but more than that, it is an ingenious automaton— a self-moving machine— and is a fine example of the kind made in Europe at the time. The Silver Swan is among the most famous surviving automata of the era. Other famous examples that have survived include The Writer automaton (1774) by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and The Peacock Clock (c.1773) also by Cox. The life-size mute swan is made of silver, with glass and metal fittings, and measures around 80 cm in height. Its chased silver repoussé body hides an internal clockwork mechanism made mainly of brass. Chemical tests conducted on the object in July 2009 reveal that the swan’s head is of very high quality (with a higher content of gold than expected), while the 122 silver leaves that decorate the outside of the ‘lagoon’ are, in fact, of comparably low quality (with higher quantities of copper, zinc and lead) (T.P. Camerer Cuss). The poorer quality of the leaves seems to support the theory that they were probably a later addition for the Paris International Exhibition of 1867 (Ibid.).
The swan is seated on a bed of around 140 contra-rotating, twisted glass rods, which imitate the appearance and motion of gushing water. In front of the swan is a sub-section consisting of seven silver and silver-gilt fish which appear to swim in the crystal current. The clockwork mechanism is orchestrated by three motors which are concealed in a metal framework below the water-line. One operates the musical cylinder, another drives the water mechanism, while yet another creates the movements of the swan and fish. The eighteenth-century technology underpinning the object is complex, employing cams, chains, levers and pulleys to produce all of the graceful movements of a real-life swan—preening, arching, swooping and eating. The effect is nothing less than breath-taking.
Every afternoon at 2, as the gallery’s lights are dimmed, the clockwork mechanism is wound up. The ensuing 40 seconds or so are nothing short of magical, leaving little surprise that the wizard who created the mechanism was an inventor named Merlin.
All of a sudden, in a Pinocchio-like moment, the once inert swan springs into life. As one of eight tunes commences to play on the music box, the bed of glass rods, which scatter the enclosure’s light, rotate fluidly, giving the impression of gushing water. Slowly, the swan begins to twist its neck and head with a level of grace that belies its clockwork inners. The swan seems to preen its back feathers, before glimpsing one of the fish that appear to swim in the current. The swan cranes its neck majestically, and in a moment of ingenious deception, ‘catches’ one of the fish that was in fact hidden inside its beak all along. The swan ‘swallows’ the fish again and resumes its upright position as the music fades away. The spectacle is over, along with the fleeting feeling that there was something eerily realistic about the whole thing. This too is how Mark Twain must have felt when he saw the Silver Swan for the very first time at the Paris exhibition in 1867 (The Bowes Museum):
I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes - watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop - watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it...
But, the Silver Swan was made to dazzle. Regarded in its era as a masterpiece of technological skill and high artistry on the part of its creators. Automata of the day, such as those made by Jaquet-Droz and Vaucanson, were admired for their actions rather than their appearance (Altick, 1978: 69). But what set Cox’s contraptions apart were their claim to beauty as well as mechanical marvel (Ibid.). As Richard D. Altick explains in his book The Shows of London (1978: 69):
Automatons that were also splendid works of art—self-acting “bijoux,” […]—were the special province of Cox’s Museum, the most elegant of eighteenth-century London exhibitions in respect to both contents and clientele.
Cox’s automata were veritable objets de luxe meant for the viewing pleasure of the very affluent and had become the focus of an intense fascination (Ibid.). As pieces of cutting-edge technology, they were often viewed as objects with truly magical properties, and were highly sought after by the well-to-do of the era. According to the historian Lisa Jardine (via MacGregor, 2012: 495):
The rich, the wealthy of all kinds, the aristocracy, everybody wanted to own a bit of technology – something with cogs and wheels and winding bits […] It immediately fascinates everyone that you can wind something up and it goes without your touching it. Clockwork is magic…
This holds especially true for the Silver Swan, as well as the other automata that were once displayed at Cox’s private museum in Spring Gardens, London, that admitted customers for the costly sum of 10s 6d and housed a collection worth £197,000 (Altick, 1978: 69). For a Georgian audience, automata were truly captivating and soon became desirable and sought-after objects. In a 1773 inventory, the Silver Swan was described as “…so astonishingly executed, that many illustrious personages who have seen it […] have pronounced it rather the creation of magic, than the production of human mechanism (T.P. Camerer Cuss, 1965).” Indeed, Cox’s curios, otherwise known as “sing-songs”, were expressly made to be desirable, luxurious objects “… with their encrustations of gold and silver, inlays of gems, and intricate systems of springs, wheels, and escapements (Altick, 1978: 69).”
Spectacle and commerce went hand in hand at the time, and automata like the Silver Swan were big business. Far more than just fancy executive toys automata had, for centuries, provided tangible evidence for materialist philosophers who viewed the cosmos as an intricate clockwork mechanism. Such a theory meant that the universe was not only capable of being fully understood, but also completely predictable and controllable. As such, automata also embodied the promise of a perfectly run society reflected in precise and orderly clockwork motions (MacGregor, 2012: 495).
Consequently, automata appealed to a market that stretched far beyond Europe, often made as expensive commodities to be sold in the Far East, or else gifted to officials and the court at Peking (Altick, 1978: 69). As Dr Simon Schaffer suggests, “…automata became captivating commodities, their meaning established in the market and their value assigned through commerce (Schaffer, 1999: 128).” Indeed, Cox’s contraptions aimed to even out the trade balance between the Empire and the Orient at a time when Britain bought substantial amounts of tea from China (Altick, 1978: 69). Under Cox and others automata had become “commodity fetishes” that “…played a significant role in the manufacturing economy and mercantile system (Schaffer, 1999: 128).”
The Silver Swan is no exception— with its own unique history of sale and ownership over the course of its long life. The Silver Swan has a well-documented provenance, passing through the hands of numerous owners who have left their own mark, sometimes literally, on the object. While the swan is in good condition, we know with certainty that the object that survives today is missing many of its original features. Chief among these was a spectacular canopy that once surrounded the object. Evidence for this canopy, as well as details of other missing additions—a series of mirrors, a rock “embellished with a profusion of jewellery, and other elegant designs” and a “rising sun”— can be found from the year of its creation (1773) when the swan was displayed at Cox’s museum:
‘This Swan is seated upon artificial water, within the most magnificent stand ever made, and is reflected by mirrors, which produce the appearance of several Swans. Under the seat is a rock of christal [sic], finely constructed and ornamented; it is mechanically set in motion, to represent the flowing down of water, which is also so reflected by mirrors, as to multiply the appearance of water works in different directions. […] Above the mirrors is a costly dome of great magnitude, on the top of which is a rising sun, that terminates the whole, and makes it near eighteen feet high. The rays and points of the Sun seem to extend from a body of fire in the center.’
These original features survived the transition between Cox and the swan’s next owners— a series of showmen who displayed it in the very building that once housed Cox’s own museum. The first of these showmen was a man named Davies, an assistant to Cox who established his own “Grand Museum” in the building between 1791 and 1801. Among the items on display was a “…swan, made of silver plumage, moving upon artificial water, within a most magnificent and equally costly dome.” After Davies, the swan fell into the hands of Thomas Weeks whose collection was sold posthumously in 1834 along with:
A Magnificent Temple, or canopy, 18 feet high, formed of wreaths of flowers and birds, carved and gilt in beautiful style, and supported by columns; beneath, borne on dolphins, is a font containing a swan of the most perfect symmetry, formed of pure silver and delicately chased, seated on a running stream.
The Silver Swan then passed into the hands of Thomas’s son, Charles, who eventually sold the automaton to the jeweller Harry Emmanuel on 26 May 1864, in a sale at Christie’s for £155. However, a description from the sale appears to indicate that the swan had by then lost its original canopy altogether[1]. This suggests that the canopy was made as an accessory to the original object to enhance its beauty in a museum context.
It is while under the ownership of Emmanuel that John and Joséphine Bowes first saw the Silver Swan when it was shown at the Paris International Exhibition (1867) (The Bowes Museum). Joséphine, whose father was a clockmaker, seems to have held a particular fondness for automata, and may have instructed her husband to purchase the swan from Briquet and Samper for 5000 francs (£200) in 1872/3 (Ibid.). The Silver Swan was sent from Paris to the Bowes Museum in 1878 with a list of instructions and has remained there ever since— becoming the museum’s most cherished object and even its official symbol.
In 1892, when the museum first opened, the Silver Swan formed part of the collection that was on display. However, more than a century of constant use had taken its toll, and between the rest of 1892 and 1939, the automaton no longer worked and instead sat idle. During the Second World War the swan was even disassembled and kept in storage until it was eventually restored to working order under Howard Davidson. Conservation was carried out on the swan numerous times by T.P. Camerer Cuss as well as Reid & Son (Newcastle), revealing the marks of past owners— namely, ‘Weeks’, scratched on a barrel. The swan was even serviced twice a year by Durham University technician Ray Mand between 1979 and 2008, before undergoing serious conservation in 2008 at the hand of Matthew Read and a team of assistants.
After almost two and a half centuries, the Silver Swan still manages to induce a sense of awe and wonder in an audience more accustomed to lifelike CGI and virtual reality than clockwork contraptions. As we emerge into a brave new world of robotic automation, the Silver Swan is, in many ways, as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the notions of ruling, steering and robotics are all hidden deep inside our word ‘cybernetics’— a term synonymous with automation— and thus are also notions embodied by the Silver Swan[2] (MacGregor 2012: 492). With this in mind, the Silver Swan can lay claim to being one of few objects that can help us navigate the uncertain metaphysical terrain that awaits us in the coming decades and beyond.
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Bibliography
Altick, R.D.D. (1978) The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 7 June.
G.L. Apperson. (1899). 'Some Old Museums and Collections: James Cox's Museum’ The Antiquary 35, pp.276-279.
T.P., Camerer Cuss. (June 1965). The Silver Swan, Antiquarian Horology, 330-34., number 11, vo.4.
Le Corbeiller, Claire. (June 1970). ‘James Cox: A Biographical Review' The Burlington Magazine, CXII, no.807, pp.351-358
Elder, John (April 1989). ‘The Bowes Museum's Silver Swan’ Clocks.
Fitzgerald, Alison. (2007). ‘Astonishing Automata: Staging spectacle in eighteenth century Dublin’ Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, vol.X, pp.18-33
French, A. (1985) John Joseph Merlin: The Ingenious Mechanick, [exhibition catalogue] Kenwood, (ed.), pp.50-53, 123-128.
Kane, Sarah. (1996-97). ‘The Silver Swan: the biography of a curiosity’, Things, no.5, Winter, pp.39-57
MacGregor, N. (2012) A history of the world in 100 objects. London: Penguin Books.
Pagani, C. (January 1995). ‘The Clocks of James Cox: chinoiserie and the clock trade with China, (etc.)’, Apollo, pp.15-22.
Roberts, Derek. (1999). ‘James Cox and the Chinese Export Market’ Mystery, Novelty and Fantasy Clocks, (?), pp.165-177.
Robinson, John Martin. (May 13, 2009). ‘Silver Sensation’ Country Life, pp.84-86 [with reconstruction drawing by Stephen Conlin of the original canopy]
Schaffer, Simon. (1999). Enlightened Automata. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, 126-65., edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Roger. (June 2000). 'James Cox (c1723-1800): a revised biography', The Burlington Magazine, pp. 353-361.
Smith, Roger. (2004). 'James Cox', entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Smith, Roger. (March 2008). ‘The Sing-Song Trade: Exporting Clocks to China in the Eighteenth Century’ Antiquarian Horology, pp.629-658.
Weaving, Allen, H. (Summer 1991). ‘Clocks for the Emperor’ Antiquarian Horology, no.4, vol.19, pp.367-389.
Wetmore, A. (2009). Sympathy Machines: Men of Feeling and the Automaton. Eighteenth-Century Studies 43(1), 37-54. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved December 30, 2016, from Project MUSE database.
Young, H. (1996). ‘A drawing from the circle of James Cox…’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.138, 402-04.
Zek, Yuna. & Smith, Roger. (June 2005). ‘The Hermitage Peacock: How an Eighteenth Century Automaton Reached St. Petersburg’ Antiquarian Horology, pp. 699-715.
Websites
Coutts, H. (2016) The Silver Swan. Available at: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-silver-swan/ [Accessed: 30 December 2016].
The Bowes Museum. (2016) The silver swan. Available at: http://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/Collections/Explore-The-Collection/The-Silver-Swan [Accessed: 30 December 2016].
Museum Network UK. (no date) Workshop of James Cox - silver swan. Available at: http://www.museumnetworkuk.co.uk/materials/galleries/cox.html [Accessed: 30 December 2016].
Wiktionary contributors, 'governor', Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary, 7 January 2017, 00:11 UTC, Available at: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=governor&oldid=42003727 [Accessed: 2 January 2017].
[1] The Christie’s sale description reads “…the silver swan, life-size, in chased silver, the mechanical action producing a graceful movement of the neck, and feeding upon silver fish, accompanied by bell music.”
[2] The words “governor” and “cybernetics” are cognate with each other, and are ultimately descended from Ancient Greek kubernḗtēs, (“steersman, pilot, guide”).
