John Joseph Merlin he wheeled about himself, with great facility to any part of the room." At an event held by Teresa Cornelys in Carlisle House, Soho Square, Merlin appeared somewhat disastrously on roller skates of his own invention. By April 1783 Merlin was putting his musical instruments and his automatons on display at his own museum. Advertisements invited readers to visit his Museum of Musical Instruments and Mechanical Inventions at No. 2, Princes Street, Hanover Square, London. Well-off Londoners could meet their friends at Merlin's Mechanical Museum in the afternoon or evening, pay to see the exhibits, and drink tea or coffee
John Joseph Merlin went to live with an aunt, Elizabeth Hazell, and is identified in Merlin's 1803 will as his "niece". Merlin seems to have withdrawn from public life for a time after his wife's death in 1793. He advertised no new inventions until April 1795. From then on, public appearances and inventions are mixed intermittently with reports of his ill health. Merlin's last public appearance may have been in January 1803, when he appeared in Hyde-park in a carriage without horses, powered by a windlass. Merlin is noted for the manufacture of ingenious automata, in particular the Silver Swan that he developed