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 He was referred to by contemporaries as "The Ingenious Mechanic". Jean-Joseph Merlin was born on September 6, 1735, in Huy, in the Walloon Region of the Province of Liège in what is now Belgium. His parents were blacksmith Maximilien Joseph Merlin and his wife Marie-Anne Levasseur. He was baptised the same day as he was born, at the parish church of Saint-Pierre-Outre-Meuse in Huy. A broadsheet obituary and later sources give his birthdate incorrectly as September 17, 1735. Merlin's parents had married in 1732. Merlin was the third of six children; his mother died when he was eight. Merlin's father