Museum of Books and Printing

Wednesday we traveled to the Museum of Books and Printing. I found the Museum very well laid out and our guide very knowledgeable. What I really enjoyed was our "pre-tour" where our guide described the history of the town. In particular, I liked the history of the tablet from Claudus' speech and wall plaque above it. The plaque had a lion and a man and woman holding jugs with flowing water that represented the two rivers in Lyon - the smaller, curvier, feminine Saone River and the broader, larger, masculine Rhone River.

Book printing

Earlier this week on Wednesday we went to tour the book printing museum. Each room was in chronological order of the advances of book printing. The first room had wood block printing, which was passages in books carved out of wood. This was not a very good method because the wood took long to carve and would wear out rather quickly. This room also talked about how the monks would copy down books. If I remember correctly around the time of the Renissance more people would read, and the monks couldn't keep up with the order. Then the printing press came about. What took monks nearly a day to finish now took less than two minutes. There was several steps to the printing press. First a man would take steal carved letters and write the page, except the letters were backwards so when they printed it looked correctly, and he had to do it from the bottom of the page up, so the letters would stay in place. Then using ink and dog skin ( poor doggies, I didn't like this part :(    ) would ink the page of steal letters. A board with parchment was then flipped on top of the letters and another man would use a lever to press down, thus creating the page. To clarify the two minutes started after orginizing the steal letters. Then we talked about improvements to the printing press, we saw how newspapers were made with copper drum rolls and spools of paper, and we ran short of time so we looked around some rooms with giant cameras and old computers. That was our tour!

Jack of all trades

On monday we went to the Ampere House where we saw an overview of the works of Andre Ampere. The thing that surprised me was how diverse his work was. At the house we saw some documents with his work in biology as well as mathematics. I dont know if the fields of science and math were at a stage of development where someone could contribute so much to several fields or if Ampere was truly that innovative. Regardless it was impressive that his work was so diverse.

Ampere house

With a crazy bus ride to start off my first full day in Lyon, France, the group toured the Ampere house. It was interesting to learn about how Ampere, as a kid, taught himself basic schooling and so much more by just reading the book in his father's library alone. But even more interesting was the hands on experiments that the staff was nice enought to set up for us.  One was about solar energy.  First, the group guested how many watts they can get from the sun. After that, we used a meter to find the real number which was 900 watts. Nexted, we used a solar panel to pump water. Then, we talked about storing energy without having a battery by pumping water to a elavated tank, then at night running the water back through the pump to make energy. Last, we mapped the relation between volts and amp using the solar panel and resisters.

Jacquard loom in real life

After researching the Jacquard loom for my site assignment I thought I would be bored in the old silk weaving district of Lyon the first couple days of our trip. I was fortunately completely wrong! I knew the general mechanics of how the old looms and the jacquard loom operated, but being able to see it was a better learning experience than I could've expected.
How fortunate we are to be able to see the warp threads lift according to the pattern 'programmed' on the punch cards to allow the weft color to slide between the threads to ultimately make nearly priceless material. To be able to hold material worth more than €20000 per square meter was so cool. This material is quite rare today. There are only a couple old style shops which can produce authentic jacquard material for restorations alone, along with just a couple companies which will take orders to produce materials for restorations or for the very very wealthy. In some ways it is amazing that this art was able to survive and be a remembered art form today.

Maison des Canuts

Yesterday we went to Maison des  Canuts to learn about the silk industry and looms. The tour guide was great, and explained all about the process of hatching and raising silk worms. I never realized that a strand of silk is obtained by unraveling an entire cocoon! Also, our tour guide showed us how a loom works. She was quite young, and I was surprised. It's great that they're teaching people how to use the looms so that the knowledge is never lost. She showed us how much work it took to weave silk, and even let us touch fabric that was worth $18000!

Maison des Canuts

When visiting the Maison des Canuts, we learned about the process of how they get the silk that will later to be woven. First, the silk worm eggs would need heat so people would put them in their beds and sleep with them to give off their body heat. When the eggs hatched, they were silk worms that eventually formed cocoons made out of silk. They would then have to unravel the silk without breaking it by putting it in warm water. I found it really fascinating how much time and effort was put into this process to get silk.