The Franklin Institute’s Rhythmic Machines
When I was a kid, living outside Philadelphia and accustomed to constant visits to the city, I thought of the Franklin Institute as my family’s special museum.
There were other museums, of course… I loved the part of the Philadelphia Art Museum with the medieval weapons and armor, but all the naked statues made me very uncomfortable. And I was too young for the Mutter Museum, with its medical oddities and old timey charm. The Please Touch Museum just wasn’t part of our rotation.
But we went to the Franklin institute regularly, and I got to know it like a friend.
In my memories of this time, the Franklin Institute is a strangely bare and echoey place of learning and wandering, a true “Institute“ of hard surfaces and high ceilings and placards. It’s basically the opposite of the Mutter Museum, a dark, stifling gallery of the squicky and grotesque. I could probably write another whole mini-essay comparing the two.
The Franklin Institute had three key landmarks that really stuck with me: a giant pendulum hanging down from the ceiling of a stairwell, a clockwork display of balls rolling along tracks, and a scaled up model of a human heart that we could walk through. The museum as a whole, I remember as sort of an artifact, a configuration of corridors and galleries connecting these three anchor points.
And as they were connected by the architecture of the Institute, so they are also connected by their nature: distillations of scientific principles, operating endlessly, free of context. The pendulum swinging according to the movement of the earth, the Rolling Ball Machine using gravity and resistance to regulate the flow of its billiard balls. The heart as a macroscopic model of the body’s hydraulic pump, scaled up to a point where we could be the blood moving through its chambers. Rhythmic machines.
And we are also rhythmic machines, aren’t we? — rhythm being the way nature imposes order on her own chaos. The body’s algorithms, circulation and respiration, and the mind as well. Inhale, exhale. Sleep, wake, sleep.
I was running around in the Franklin institute, exploring the chambers of the heart, a full 10 years before my own heart started needing attention — before I heard its otherworldly subterranean pumping sound through an ultrasound’s playback. And it’s only now, decades later, that I remember the Franklin Institute’s pendulum and think of my own body trying to regulate itself, blood sugar swinging from high to low, slowed by the weight of the insulin that I inject into my tissues.
Me and my body, my family, the Franklin Institute — the heart, the pendulum, the Rolling Ball Machine. We craft a logical world around ourselves, turning the enigmas of nature into something almost mundane… or placing the wonderous on a platform, or in a glass box.
Our way of articulating this reality, of creating a sort of architecture of memory from the connective tissue of relationships across our lives — this is its own sort of miracle. And half a lifetime later, the Franklin Institute is still standing there in the heart of Philadelphia.
