Father’s Day ferry trip to Musee Mechanique in San Francisco, “one of the world’s largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines.” Astonishing to learn just how much engineering prowess went into some of these, long before anyone had ever envisioned a programmable EEPROM. And how some of the machines had held up to decades of use with minimal maintenance (others had been completely restored). Kind of surprised that Miles was frightened by a lot of these – not like him. Behold the power of antique animatronics (Flickr set).
The collection was recently moved into a warehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf from its original home at the Cliff House, and the new environment seemed drab, kind of trashy, and unbefitting of this incredible collection.