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 as a mechanician with British jeweller and goldsmith James Cox. As Cox's chief mechanician, Merlin worked with him to create pieces such as Cox's barometric clock (before 1768) and the Silver Swan (1773). In addition Merlin acted as a manager and curator of Coxs Jewelry Museum in Spring Gardens, which became a favored gathering-place of fashionable London between 1772 and 1775. Horace Walpole referred to the sort of creations displayed by Cox and Merlin as "scientific toys". Fanny Burneys characters visit Cox's museum and debate the significance of such creations in her novel "Evelina". Samuel Johnson asserts the underlying importance