Prophets and Backtellers: Mechanical Museums and the Commercialization of Technical Knowledge in Late-Eighteenth-Century London

From February 1772, when the jeweler James Cox opened his museum in Spring Gardens, a cluster of commercial museums charged admission to see automata and mechanisms. Where natural history collections displayed accumulated specimens, these exhibited contemporary invention. A visitor to Cox’s museum could see that an automaton worked; nothing in the display revealed how it had been made. This article examines those ventures, particularly mechanical museums. Using Joel Mokyr’s distinction between propositional and prescriptive knowledge, with Pierre Bourdieu, Tony Bennett, and Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, I show how proprietors turned display into social and symbolic capital. Exhibition also let a proprietor claim priority without disclosing the innovation’s workings, which mattered when patent protection was expensive and uncertain. Cox’s enterprise reached the Chinese imperial court but proved no more durable there than in London. Each museum failed as a going concern. No individual collapse can be explained, but the pattern holds across ventures that had little in common. The limits were those of the commercial model rather than the failings of individual proprietors. By approaching these museums as commercial ventures, this article brings business history together with the histories of technology and collecting, and identifies the precursors of nineteenth-century exhibition culture.