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Today curator Ben Russell is going to show me

something that Victorians might have

got up to in their equivalent of your garden shed. In another

These look incredible and they look 3D printed to me but I'm guessing they

are a little bit older than that?

A bit before 3D printing.

If you're a mechanically minded chap or woman actually,

and you wanted to play with machines, before the car came along,

you'd have a lathe. A lathe like this.

This is just the bare bones of the machine.

You would have a chuck here which holds

a piece of material like Ivory or Boxwood or something like that.

And then as you rotated it here you've got a treadle here, so

like a Singer sewing machine you would treadle away and that would turn the piece.

And you would have a cutting tool here which would cut into it.

and what they're doing is reproducing remarkable decorative pieces like this.

If you pick this up, you think that looks a little bit strange,

but then you turn it through 90 degrees and realize it's the Duke of Wellington, which is really quite smashing.

So is this all carved from one continuous piece? Actually what is it?

Not always.

This would be fossil ivory - no issue there - because fossil Ivory would

have been lying around on the floor for millennia from dead elephants which had died.

And so basically you would be producing little tiny parts which would

have gradually slot together; some of the parts are quite big and then you

get some of these little tiny decorative bits like these.

So the idea is you would buy the lathe and you would buy the attachments. Ah, we have the manual.

Absolutely so here we have Holtzapffel's Turning and Mechanical Manipulation Volume 5.

There's a sixth volume in which they never planned.

And what you have here... this is your guidebook to your world of mechanical wonders

in ornamental turning. And as you can see once you start opening,

you have these worked examples which were produced to say look you can do this too.

So is this the sort of thing that someone would have in their shed?

Yes in a way this is the proto shed; some place you would go and hide away from your family

and have a smoke and probably some alcohol and then do that sort of thing.

So people with these would have a workshop and you go away and you

produce turning and very often these pieces were designed to be

shown off. You're showing your skill as a turner

by producing a piece like this.

And you would display it in your drawing room or living room.