A new exhibition featuring 23 exotic clockwork treasures beloved by Chinese emperors, and loaned from The Palace Museum in Beijing, opened this week at the Science Museum in London. The magnificent 18th century automata, called Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: meaning ‘self-sounding bells’ or ‘bells that ring themselves’, combine timekeeping,...
The Automobili Lamborghini Museum, just outside Bologna, officially reopened on the weekend following a redesign and new layout. The reopening marks the start, of Lamborghini’s 60th anniversary celebrations. The museum has changed its name and been entirely remodelled, both in its layout and design, and in its...
The Écomusée in the old port area of Saint-Nazaire focuses on the port’s historic, industrial and maritime heritage. Who knew!? Most Anglophones, me included, think the “Éco Museum” is something to do with the environment, and probably linked to the EOL-Wind Turbine experience nearby. I wouldn’t have...
Croatia’s long-awaited Peljesac Bridge was opened yesterday by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. The stunning piece of engineering is a cable-stayed road bridge, supported by six pylons stretching 2.4km (1.5 mile) from the Croatian mainland to the Peljesac peninsula. The significance of the bridge is that it ends...
The clock museum, or ‘Musée de l’Horlogerie’, in Saint-Nicolas-d’Aliermont presents a really interesting social and industrial account of the rise and partial decline of a town focused on a single technology. Back in the 1950/60s, Saint-Nicolas-d’Aliermont was renowned in France as a centre of light engineering, particularly...
Lotus is reopening its Hethel production facility to the public. Factory tours at the ‘home of Lotus’ will start on Monday 4th April 2022. Lotus has been making performance cars at Hethel, just outside Norwich in Norfolk, since 1966. In November 2017 they suspended their factory tours...
It’s a serious piece of engineering, can you guess what Blue X is? Blue X is a wave machine, designed by Mocean Energy to generate green energy from the movement of the waves. Essentially, it pivots in the middle, and that’s where the generator is. This 10-kW...
The Morgan Motor Company has just today, unveiled its latest model – The Super 3, a 3-wheeled sports car with 21st century design & tech. Morgan, now 113 years old, was famous from the outset for its range of three-wheeled sports cars, which they continued to make...
The long-awaited new sea lock at IJmuiden opens on Weds (26 Jan). This massive marine engineering project at the gateway to the North Sea Canal (Noordzeekanaal) which leads to Amsterdam, got underway back in 2016. Now, finally* the new lock, which replaces the old North Lock (Noordersluis)**...
The Aston Martin Heritage Trust museum is home to some classic, and beautiful, examples of auto engineering excellence. The museum tells the story of the brand’s luxury sports cars and grand tourers – their amazing engine design, development and manufacturing, and their motor racing history. I went...
You’ve gotta love it! What a spectacular piece of engineering the Napier Sabre is! At least, what a spectacular engineering concept. Sadly its early iterations at the start of WW2 weren’t always the finest examples of engineering quality control when they went into production. So they weren’t...
Any nautical engineers or ship designers out there, who know the answer? We’ve all been enjoying the sight of Celebrity Edge being delivered and now embarking on her first cruises. Her stand-out (literally) feature is the ‘Magic Carpet’ – “the world’s first cantilevered, floating platform” that rises...
The Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers (REME) museum re-opened in June last year at MOD Lynham in Wiltshire. The corps has had a museum since 1958. It was originally a small collection located in a few rooms at Moat House in REME’s base at Arborfield outside Reading....
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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