The Silver Swan is an automaton dating from the 18th century and now housed in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Teesdale, County Durham, England. It was acquired by John Bowes, the museum's founder, from a Parisian jeweller in 1872.[1]
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.[2]
A small silver fish may just be seen in the foreground
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 take place; when the exhibit was being prepared for reopening in May 2021 the clockwork mechanism was found to have seized up and it was withdrawn from display for further conservation.[2][3]
The swan was described in the Cox's Museum Act 1772 (13 Geo. 3. c. 41) as being 3 feet (0.91 m) in diameter and 18 feet (5.49 m) high.[4] This would seem to indicate that at one time there was more to the swan than remains today as it is no longer that high. It is said that there was originally a waterfall behind the swan, which was stolen while it was on tour – this could possibly explain the height which is now 'missing'.[2]
It is known that the swan was sold several times and was shown at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1867. The American novelist Mark Twain observed the swan and recorded his observation in a chapter of the Innocents Abroad,[2] writing that the swan "had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes.[1]"
In 2017 starting in February the swan spent 6 weeks at the Science Museum as part of an exhibition on robots.[5][3] In October 2021, the Bowes Museum hosted a 'Silver Swan Study Week', led by clockmaker-conservator Matthew Read.[6] During the week, visitors were able to watch a group of specialist conservators and curators dismantle the swan as they explored the mechanical condition of the object, ahead of creating a conservation plan for its preservation.[7] The swan was returned to a functional state by March 2024.[8]
The Bowes Museum believes that the Swan is their best-known artefact, and it is the basis of the museum's logo.[2]
↑ 13 Geo III cap XLI James Cox Enabling Act contains an inventory of the pieces in Cox's museum, with descriptions: "A ſwan, large as life formed of ſilver…the whole eighteen feet high"
John Harrison was an English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea.
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An automaton is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions. 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 or will, like a mechanical robot. The term has long been commonly associated with automated puppets that resemble moving humans or animals, built to impress and/or to entertain people.
Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, artisan, artist and mathematician from the Artuqid Dynasty of Jazira in Mesopotamia. He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described 50 mechanical devices, along with instructions on how to construct them. He is credited with the invention of the elephant clock. He has been described as the "father of robotics" and modern day engineering.
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The Bowes Museum is an art gallery in the town of Barnard Castle, in County Durham in northern England. It was built to designs by Jules Pellechet and John Edward Watson to house the art collection of John Bowes and his wife Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier, and opened in 1892.
A brazen head, brass, or bronze head was a legendary automaton in the early modern period whose ownership was ascribed to late medieval scholars, such as Roger Bacon, who had developed a reputation as wizards. Made of brass or bronze, the male head was variously mechanical or magical. Like Odin's head of Mimir in Norse paganism, it was reputed to be able to correctly answer any question put to it, although it was sometimes restricted to "yes" or "no" answers. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Browne considered them to be misunderstanding of the scholars' alchemical work, while in modern times, Borlik argues that they came to serve as "a metonymy for the hubris of Renaissance intellectuals and artists". Idries Shah devotes a chapter of his book The Sufis to providing an interpretation of this "head of wisdom" as well as the phrase "making a head", stating that at its source the head "is none other than the symbol of the [Sufic] completed man."
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"Silver swan automaton", at the Bowes Museum 
