I was taken to the Musée des Arts et Métiers when I was in Paris last year and I thought it a worthwhile place to revisit with my sisters. We went by Metro to the museum, and the metro station itself is well worth a visit, copper clad walls and with pieces of ‘machinery’ protruding through the roof, ‘portholes’ on the platform showing articles, or miniatures of articles, from the museum.

By Stephen Butterworth – Paris Metro – Arts et Metiers, CC BY-SA 2.0

The museum is in a large building, a former monastery, with a former chapel attached. Suspended from the top of the dome of the chapel is a Foucault Pendulum, a device which demonstrates that the earth rotates. Until it was damaged in 2010, this was the original Foucault pendulum, it is now a replica, with the original (damaged) weight on display nearby. Also in the chapel are examples of French engineering, a Renault F1 car which Alain Proust drove, Bleriot’s aircraft, a model of the Statue of Liberty (which was made in France and gifted to the US), a cutaway Citroen saloon and other items.

In the main museum is a huge collection of French and French related items, printing presses, communications gear, railways prototypes and models, too numerous to list them all; we spent a fascinating few hours there.

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