After the Cable Car museum, we walked up to Fisherman's Wharf to visit the
Musée Mécanique, a free museum of hundreds of antique arcade games and other coin-operated mechanical devices. All of the machines still work, so armed with a stack of quarters you can have a lot of fun wandering around and playing with them. There are so many different machines it was almost overwhelming, so I've tried to divide them into categories for sharing here.
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| Museum Entrance |
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| Sign on most of the machines |
Models of Everyday Scenery
I guess that before there was TV and movies, it was very entertaining to watch moving models of various types of work sites. You know, fascinating places like...
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| Oil Fields! |
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| Saw Mills! |
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| A Farm! |
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| A carnival! (Actually this one is fun) |
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Music Machines
There were lots of elaborate music boxes and variations of player pianos. We didn't spend as much time with these machines since they were the most straightforward, but there was one incredibly cool one that - in addition to being a player piano - also had lots of drums and tambourines, and even a triangle.
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| This music box had dancing ballerinas |
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| Close-up of the ballerinas |
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Love Machines
You know, because the best way to test your ability as a lover is to squeeze a metal handle, or shake hands with a creepy wizard.
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| From "flat tire" to "lovable" |
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| I got "innocent" on this one |
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| Sexy without nipples |
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| Sex Wizard |
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| "Shake hand of wizard...light indicates sex appeal" |
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| One of the options is "gay," no idea in what sense |
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Fortune-Telling Machines
In addition to their insight on our sex lives, many machines also have words of wisdom about our futures. I tried one in which "Zodi" uses a typewriter to share your personal horoscope - it was neat in that you get to keep the typewritten paper "Zodi" creates for you.
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| Instructions to "establish mystic contact" |
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| My horoscope |
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Martini tried a palmistry one, which was cool in that it actually sent up little pokey-things to prod her hand before spitting out a pre-printed fortune.
The small sign under "Insert 50 ¢" says "For over sixty years these unique American devices have been dispensing with absolute accuracy reliable information upon which to base future life-making decisions. Without them and left to chance, one might only guess what mistakes we frail mortals might have made..."
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| Front of Martini's fortune |
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| Back of her fortune |
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There was also a "career pilot" machine that promised to tell you what career you are most suited for, among options like "love pirate" and "stooge."
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| Also "adagio dancer" and "clock watcher" |
Games
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the machines were interactive games. They often turned out to be more fun in theory than they were to actually play, given the difficulty of controlling the mechanical components, but it was still neat to see what types of activities people considered game-worthy (and how many of them are still popular topics of video games).
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| Football! Complete with knitted sweaters. |
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| Bowling! |
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| "Sidewalk Engineering!" |
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| Sharpshooting! |
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| Wresting! This one has a warning about its "superhuman strength" |
Executions
There were multiple machines that re-enacted various types of executions. Maybe these should actually be considered part of the "everyday scenery" category?
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| "English Execution" machine |
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| "French Execution" machine |
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| "English Execution" in action (hanging) |
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| "French Execution in action (guillotine) |
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| Execution of unspecified nationality |
Old-school Racism
Most of the machines were in the neighborhood of a hundred years old, and it showed. A lot.
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| That is a dead American Indian in the center |
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| "Cantina de Rosa" |
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| "Opium Den" full of Chinese figures |
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| A Polynesian dancer |
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| This was part of the carnival display - note the African man as one of the wild animals. |
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| I know "hillbilly" isn't actually a race... |
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| ...but these were still pretty offensive. |
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XXX
There were lots of versions of peep show machines, but since they were from the Victorian era, most of them were pretty tame.
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| This one contained a fully clothed man and woman touching each other on the shoulder. |
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| All I could see in this one was feathers. |
Miscellaneous Weirdness
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| "Old Harry had one too many again" |
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| Another drunk |
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| This Ferris wheel was made by prisoners out of toothpicks |
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| No idea what is going on here. |
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| This was really cool - a Proxinoscope from 1889 that showed a girl skipping rope. |
Last but not least...
All good museums end with a gift shop, and true to form this one was entirely mechanized.
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