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 one from 1780 is in Munich's Deutsches Museum. Merlin also experimented with violins and violas. Merlin moved in increasingly illustrious circles, socializing with Londoners from the gentry and nobility. Friend and musicologist Charles Burney commissioned his instruments, and even played one of them in a courtroom to defend Merlin's patent. Johann Christian Bach performed publicly on Merlin's instruments, and around 1774 Johann Christian Fischer was painted by Gainsborough standing next to one of Merlin's pianos. Thomas Gainsborough painted Merlin himself in 1781, holding a pocket beam balance which he had invented. Even though she regarded him as a foreigner, novelist