Meccano display, reborn

Meccanooooo!

One of the major 2016 exhibit improvements that we've been working on for the 25th anniversary is a complete overhaul and upgrade of our main Meccano display area, which we've now finally finished (save the occasional last-minute tweak) in time for the visitors who will be coming to Brighton for ModelWorld 2016.

This is a refit that we've been itching to do for the last seven or so years, as we've been progressively collecting more and more Meccano Ltd.-related rarities that couldn't be fitted into the existing display.  

Some Meccano rarities

The "original" version of the display with its crane centrepiece was was one of the museum's core attractions, and was originally assembled in a bit of a hurry, after which the difficulty of moving the monster crane meant that it was difficult to revise the display without essentially ripping everything out and starting again – a rather intimidating prospect. The new glass shelves mean that the space now holds a much larger number of items than it used to, and while the huge "Outfit No. 10" Meccano Giant Block-Setting Crane is still the centrepiece, the display now holds a far wider range of Meccano and Meccano-related pieces, including some extremely rare and desirable items that we've had in storage for a while, such as the Meccano Ltd Sawbench and Butter Churn. 

Meccano Ltd. made things other than Meccano

As well as standard Meccano and the Meccano Aeroplane Constructor sets and aircraft, the right-hand side of the revamped display now also includes a No.1 Meccano Motor Car Constructor set and the company's clockwork model Two-Seater Sports Car, more construction sets including examples of the short-lived British Model Builder / X Series sets, and some of the very rarest and hard-to-find parts. The left-hand part now has space to include examples of auxiliary Meccano Ltd. product ranges such as the Kemex chemistry sets, Dinky Builder, and Elektrikit and Elektron electrical outfits.

While there's no longer much that the company made that isn't represented in the display or elsewhere in the museum (we even have a solitary vanishingly-rare pre-Meccano ~1902 Frank Hornby Mechanics Made Easy pulleywheel), if anything else exceptional and Meccano-related does come our way, we probably now have the space to show it.

Toys Of 100 Years Ago

We've just received the posters that the children of Firle School were good enough to draw for us and may I say how impressed I was with the pictures? They're so much fun and colourful, opening the mail with them in really brightened up a gloomy winter's day.

The children came in a couple of weeks ago to take part in a school's museum visit where they get a chance to look around the museum, find some some particular object including a bear, a doll, a Meccano windmill and even a circus. Once these toys have been identified we have a chance to talk about them, how old they are, what they were made of and how different, or even how similar they are to toys that we can still find in our own toy boxes today.

We discovered that Meccano was hard to make although you can still get it and in the old days toy horses were made of real horse! (Well, their tails and manes were made of real horsehair anyway.) It's sad that we don't have the names of the children on the posters they made or we could thank them individually, however, they really are a great job and we want to thank you all for all your great effort and hard work.

This afternoon we have been been laminating the poster's we've got here and we're going to put them up in the museum. If you can't make it into the museum though, I've attached the pictures we received from Ms Ricca so that you can see them anyway.
Thanks again to reception and years one and two and all the staff and helpers who came along, we loved your visit and hope you can make it along again some time soon.

Meccano Mechanisms

The museum has recently built two more new cabinets to help commemorate Frank Hornby's 150th anniversary.

Meccano has been inspiring mechanics, engineers and inventors of all ages to construct imaginative creations ever since its invention in 1901, and our new displays showcase some of the mechanical marvels that can be achieved with this ingeniously simple toy. Inspired by characters in the 1925 story book, "Adventures in Meccanoland", these cabinets are populated with Meccano people known as "Meccanitians", who need help finishing their tasks. Come along and help Bill and Fred finish sawing their log, or see Andy's wonderful windmill!

A wood-sawing team, and a line of jumping chirping chickens

Andy needs to adjust the windmill's tower so that it points into the wind.

The pieces are interactive, and are operated by handles on the cabinet sides.

Frank Hornby 150th Anniversary

The Frank Hornby 150th Anniversary logo, in dark red.

2013 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of British toymaking pioneer Frank Hornby.

Hornby didn't just invent Hornby Trains: he also invented Dinky Toys, and he got his start when he invented Meccano, originally as a way of making it easier to make toys for his own children out of strips of cut-up biscuit tins.

Hornby patented the idea behind his modular metal construction kit in 1901, and the system evolved to become "Mechanics Made Easy", an educational system for teaching engineering principles to children, before being given the more catchy name of "Meccano".

Meccano Ltd. grew to become an international company with headquarters at Binns Road, Liverpool, and Hornby became a millionaire and a Member of Parliament.

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The Museum has just been awarded a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund to help it to celebrate 2013 as Frank Hornby Year. The grant will pay for a full-time Project Officer for a year to rewrite and dramatically expand our online resources for Meccano, Dinky Toys and Hornby Trains, and to set up a project website at FrankHornby150.org to hold a directory of participating groups and organisations, and a calendar of their 2013 events. We'll also be holding events focussing on Frank Hornby Week (13th-19th May 2013), launching the programme at the 2013 ModelWorld exhibition in February, and doing some other Very Cool Stuff including some very exciting things on the Museum floor with new technology to allow visitors to access information from the Museum floor. 

As well as its Meccano exhibits, the Museum has what we believe to be the best collection of early Hornby Trains on public display anywhere in the World (in Arch Four), and this grant will let us finally install information systems that can do these collections justice. We're also hoping to bring in some new guest exhibits for 2013 to mark the anniversary.

More information to follow as these exciting developments unfold ...