I had no idea timepieces had gotten this small this early. Patek Philippe Museum, Geneva.
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Patek Philippe Museum. The sous fondant technique was used to produce glowing miniatures that are colorfast to this day.
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Inscribed "Joh. Melchior Wetschgi, Augsburg, 1726", this device is for cutting gears with different numbers of teeth. The work was mounted on the vertical mandrel in the center; to cut a gear tooth, the cutter wheel mounted on the horizontal shaft, rotated by a belt attached to the brass pulley, was advanced into the blank using the big windup key, and then the disk was advanced to the next index hole to cut the next tooth. At about 5:00 you can see stamped into the disk the number of teeth in each ring of holes. Appears to be the same animal shown at digital.deutsches-museum.de/en/digital-catalogue/collecti...; the description there reads "Gear cutting machine by Johann Melchior Wetschgi: The hand-operated gear cutting machine, built without a tripod, allowed the watchmaker to quickly make gears of various diameters."
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We did not enjoy Geneva. We would have loved to have toured CERN, but they make that so difficult we didn't even try. So we showed up for the tour here at the UN -- probably Geneva's biggest tourist attraction -- and discovered that it was closed to visitors. Then we went to the Patek Phillipe museum. Once burned, twice shy: we carefully checked its website to make sure the listed hours were still good. Didn't help: we got there and discovered a sign on the door saying they were closed until the afternoon. Didn't have any problems like this in the German-speaking part of Switzerland! And didn't help that all of this was in the pouring rain. Anyway, this is all we saw of the Palais des Nations.
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