Good evening. I'm Rukhi Nuhal Ravekumar, the director of education at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. And I have the pleasure of welcoming you to the Enid and Lester Morse historic design lecture. Thanks to the tremendous support of trustee Deni Morse and her husband Lester, this important program is a series that brings historians, scholars, and designers to Cooper Hewitt to grow our understanding of design as a social and cultural force in the world. This is the 16th program in this series. Cooper Hewitt aims to inspire, educate, and empower people through design. As some of you hopefully got to witness the recent opening of nature, Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, it's a testament to those values. Nature tracks the efforts of designers to create a more holistic and harmonious relationship with nature. There are over 60 projects that have been realized through a collaborative process of multidisciplinary creativity with designers, engineers, biologists, material scientists, philosophers, and artists working together to find meaningful alternatives for humanity to live in harmony with the natural world. If you didn't get to walk through it, I encourage you to come back and take a view of this fabulous show. You might actually need to plan several trips considering it's 60 plus objects. While the Triennial provides a snapshot of contemporary design, our work as a cultural institution is founded on and enriched by our extensive collection. So what we love about this lecture series is that we really get to take a nice peek into our collection and investigate the many stories it has to offer. Tonight, we're going to take a deep dive with Brittany Cox, who I have an absolute pleasure to welcome soon. She will provide us insight into the alluring topic of designing the sublime. I think something we could all use right now. Brittany has perhaps the most fascinating job title. She is an antiquarian horologist, which really, I think, translates to magician. More specifically, she's a clock and watchmaker who specializes in the conservation and restoration of antique automata and mechanical musical objects. Wouldn't you like to know more about her job? Her original work explores the relationship between time and the sublime and emphasizes the importance of historic craft practices. She owns and operates Memoria Technica, her own independent workshop in Seattle, where she offers a range of services, including conservation and restoration of automata, singing birds, mechanical magic, mechanical musical objects, and complicated clocks and watches. We're thrilled to have her here to share a little bit of that magic. Brittany was here about a year ago, and she was on a panel, and she got to speak for about five minutes. And we did not want her to stop talking, so we're very glad to have her back here because she told us some amazing stories about things in our collection that we had not looked at in that way before. So thank you all for coming tonight, and our sincerest thanks to Denny and Lester for all that you do for Cooper Hewitt and for inspiring us to bring people together to learn more about design and design history. And with that, I welcome Brittany Cox. Thank you so much for having me. So first I want to say thank you so much to the Cooper Hewitt for inviting me to give this talk. Emily Oro was an amazing help to me while I was going through the collection and trying to piece together this huge story using this incredible collection here at Cooper Hewitt in the Smithsonian. I also want to thank Mr. and Mrs. Lester Morse for sponsoring this series and making this possible. So I'm here to tell you a story. It's quite a large story to get through in 45 minutes, but basically, we're looking at our shared story. It's the story of objects that were made to explore our desire to know the sublime, which is a subject of so many artistic and creative philosophical pursuits. Many of the objects we'll be looking at were created to manifest that true feeling of greatness, whether moral, spiritual, physical, or aesthetic or intellectual. It's something that we see as beyond imitation, calculation, or measurement. It's something that takes us beyond ourselves, the sensation we have come to know as the sublime. The context in which these objects were created basically generated an archetypal knowledge, which many different crafts were born from. The ornamental turning of kings led to a derivative style of decoration known as guichet. This particular type of decoration was then employed by craftsmen on a variety of objects, and many of them were horological. The creation of automata by the Greeks for entertainment and the pleasure led to the presentation of automata as a scene of wonder. We had beauty and spectacle, and from here the technology evolved, and we saw the creation of the ancestor of the first programmable computer, as well as mechanical detonators for bombs and timers for space exploration. This history is rich with philosophical context about our vulnerabilities and our nature. As a historian, I want to shed light on this. As a conservator, I want to preserve and protect it. And as an artist, I want to resurrect and share it. Please join me as I walk through a bit of this history and make a case for why these objects, now more than ever, deserve our attention. My journey began with a simple music box. When I was a child, my maternal-grant grandmother gave me a particular box. It was not really as nice as this one in the Cooper Hewitt collection. This one actually plays eight tunes. It's quite a fine Swiss box. Mine was a small movement housed in a kitschy Easter egg, which later I discarded, but treasured underneath my bed. And for me, listening to notes plucked from a resonating steel comb, that conjured the sublime. But where did this music come from? So the recognition of time. It's been with us since the very beginning. Season passing, bringing food, famine, cold, and warmth. We've measured our days and lives by hours and numbers. Our timekeeping devices, a reflection of the cosmos. From the very first nomans, our sundials, to astrolabes, a map of the stars, to the path around the simple dial of a clock. It's an echo of the Earth's orbit. This is one fundamental thing we still have in common with the very first of our kind, born over 100,000 years ago, pre-Homo sapiens. It's the observation of time. This 20th century print by artist Joseph Cornell and the Smithsonian American Art Museum depicts an astronomer observing the movement of celestial bodies. Historically, units of time were defined by the movements of astronomical objects. So we had sun-based. This is where the year was the time for the Earth to rotate around the sun. We had moon-based. The month was based on the moon's orbital period around the Earth. Earth-based. The time it took for the Earth to rotate on its own axis as observed on a sundial. And then celestial sphere-based. Basically, sidereal time, where the apparent movement of the stars and constellations across the skies used to calculate the length of a year. The Egyptians divided the day into 12-hour periods and used large obelisks to track the movement of the sun as well as water clocks, which they called klepsidra. This was ancient Greece. So these water-powered escapement mechanisms, which transferred rotational energy into intermittent motions, date all the way back to the third century BC in ancient Greece. So for thousands of years, devices have been used to measure and keep track of time. In addition to creating early clocks and other clever mechanisms, many of which were documented in writings from the period, the people of ancient Greece created what we know as the seven liberal arts and sciences. The first three, grammar, rhetoric, logic, these were known as the trivium. The four subjects dealing with numbers were sacred, as math was seen to be the language of the divine, and infallible knowledge known a priori without experience. Mathematics, above all other disciplines, only deals with certainties. So to study math was to actually study the highest art form as it brought one closer to God. These subjects were known as the quadrivium, and their influence has held strong for centuries. Horology, the study and measurement of time, is a child of astronomy, the study of numbers in space and time. This print from 1543 shows the five platonic solids, the first atoms, if you will. These were born out of geometry. To the Greeks, even the fundamental building blocks of our universe consisted of perfect geometric forms, the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the icosecahedron, and the dodecahedron. This belief in a geometric system universe was built in the house of Greek philosopher Plato, and was the foundation stone for leading scientists and sovereigns and societies well into the 17th century. Isaac Newton, the English mathematician and physicist, born in 1642, would be the first to discover a new mathematical system since the publication of Euclidean Geometry in 300 BC. The seven liberal arts and sciences, including the quadrivium, the Greeks found its way both east and west, influencing both the Franks and the Islamic theologies, as doctrines were translated from Greek into Latin and Arabic, ensuring their influences for ages to come. This print in the collection at Cooper Hewitt from 1568 is a plate from German master goldsmith and designer, Warnier-Hotsmaner, and its compendium of perspectival geometry, showing two polyhedral variants based on the five platonic solids. This print from a catalog in the Cooper Hewitt Collection dated from 1732, documents turned objects of ivory from an important cabinet of curiosity, which belonged to Nicholas Collier and was devoted entirely to mechanics. In the west, the Greek texts of the seven liberal arts became the foundation of education in noble courts and the idea of God as a geometer, born in the quadrivium and the house of Plato held true. Even the world was made by a God whose language consisted of mathematical and harmonic principles. What was God but a perfect mathematician? Latheturning was invented in the 14th century and nobility were trained to turn beautiful objects on something called a rose engine lathe, where figures unknown to the imagination could be raised from the bones of the earth based on mathematical calculations, creating spiraling springs of ivory and forms rendered from the golden mean, these took anywhere from 12 to 18 months to turn. The practice of princely turning in the Middle Ages led to the transition of God as a geometer to God as a turner in the minds of sovereigns.  This print shows two methods of ornamental turning. On the left is shown what we would call a puzzle ball, where from one piece of material, a turner can generate multiple enclosed and layered spheres, one inside the other and another and so on. On the right, one can see the true form of the rosette in the work. By varying the phase of a singular waveform, there are a series of repetitious cuts along an axis. One can generate complex structures. Rosettes or cams carry the wave and the operator determines the phase, thus governing the sequence and what forms would appear. These are the types of objects that were being made. If God was a turner, then the act of turning brought one closer to God and therefore closer to being a perfect ruler. To be an accomplished turner held great significance and demonstrated that one was capable of creating objects that served a higher purpose. Objects that could be used as tools to understand the nature of the world with their perfect geometric forms, mirrors the building blocks that created our universe. Here in these towering spires of ivory was God as the geometer and God as the turner. If you can imagine a sovereign sitting in a room lit by candlelight turning a wheel or possibly using a foot pedal to generate these incredible structures. Most of us think of layers as simple metal or wood turning machines, but these ornamental layers were in a realm of their own. These layers were made for the practice of ornamental turning could actually rival their creations in splendor. Many were adorned with the finest decoration, mercury gilded surfaces, pulleys embracing arms with flowers. We had beasts of the wild adorning the corners of the plinths. These machines both conjured and embodied beauty, capable of producing perfect ratios and symmetry symbolized by sine waves. Here the technology of the industrial evolution over 300 years before. By the beginning of the 18th century, at least one example of an automaton rose engine was made. This was possibly for the King of Prussia, Frederick I. This machine was further programmable. It was capable of turning objects automatically through a weight-driven mechanism of cams and levers, which would be chosen and set into motion by the operator. One well-known King who was an accomplished turner was Louis XVI. His engine lathe is in the Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry. Lathe turning was so popular. Everyday objects were also made utilizing the art form. A court turner was employed, whose sole job was to make beautiful things for the court. The set of beautiful 18th century turn buttons in the collection of Kipper Hewitt demonstrate how prolific and popular the art form of ornamental turning was. This example on the right jumps ahead a little bit in time, but shows a clear lineage between ornamental turning and horology. This late 18th century automaton watch is unsigned, but the case is highly decorated at what adorns the back, but ornamental turning that's enveloped in a blue, translucent enamel. We will see the style of decoration later via engine turning, which is then called guillochet. But let's return to the Greeks. And the ever-important Antikythera mechanism. This is an early machine named after the island near where it was found. It was pulled from the depths of a shipwreck and is thought of as the first analog computer. It was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendars. This particular model is part of the Smithsonian Collection in the National Museum of American History. It demonstrates the technology for horological objects and complex geared systems have long dated history, possibly as far back as the first century BC. As the Antikythera mechanism is thought to be from between 87 BC and 205 BC. Though we have no physical remains of early automata, we have records of them in manuscript. And the Antikythera mechanism is proof of what was being made. Automata were found in the palaces and pleasure gardens of the Greeks. And these were common throughout the Byzantine Empire and later in Arabic kingdoms. These were known to incorporate various forms of engineering to produce their synthesis of life, utilizing a combination of mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic technology. With the capture of Byzantium by the Ottomans came the treatises and documents on mechanical life that have flourished there. The translation of these Alexandrian texts into both Greek and Latin, or from Greek and Latin into both Arabic, or from Greek into both Arabic and Latin, ensured their survival and utility first in the East and then later in the West. Not only were these manuscripts preserved and studied, but they were also expanded on. In the East, the Greek texts on automata became doctrines of divine knowledge. This page comes from a treatise on fantastic devices from a Muslim scholar, inventor, artisan, and mathematician named Al-Jazari. His elephant clock was especially intricate. Every half hour, the bird on the dome whistled. The man below dropped a ball into the dragon's mouth, and the driver hit the elephant with his goat. The met, says it's dated between 1,000 and 1,400 AD. Other sources have it dated from 1206. Remember this elephant motif and the structure of this clock as we'll see it again. It took 100 years or more for the West to embrace automata. They were originally viewed with suspicion, something exotic that had come from the East. But with the construction of clocks to regulate prayer and the elaborate astronomical clocks with moving figures made by mathematicians of the time, the church began to embrace automata for other purposes. From mechanical grottoes, hells, angels ascending to heaven and bleeding criss on crosses, the church embraced these mechanical marvels in the effect they could elicit from viewers. This monk is a poignant example in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History from the 16th century, 1500s. This holy Roman emperor, Charles V, called clockmaker, engineer, and mathematician, Juanelo Tarano, to serve in his court and build a fantastic astronomical clock. Successor to the throne, kill up the second, called upon Juanelo again, while praying at the bedside of his dying son, Philip made a deal with God. He promised a miracle for a miracle if his child could be spared. When the child recovered through divine intervention, Philip kept his bargain by having Juanelo construct a miniature penitent monk. This mechanical monk, wind wound, could glance left to right, open and close its mouth, nod its head, eyes gazing at the cross each time it was raised. It beat its breast and with its other hand and it would turn about every 20 inches as it moved forward on a flat surface. We're actually witnessing the act of mechanized prayer. If you have a busy day, just wind this up.   Can't do everything. After the first portable watches were developed in the 16th century, a descendant of small, driven table clocks, the craft began to flourish and it wasn't long before they were embellished with motif, even appearing in the shape of skulls made from bone known as memento mori watches, a reminder that time flies. This 17th century watch, roughly 100 years after our mechanical monk and the shape of crucifix on the left by Solomon Costa is from the collection at Kewper Hewitt. It's finally made from rock crystal, mercury-grilled brass and steel and has a leather carrying case. I had the privilege of looking at this piece today. It's incredible. On the right, automata and themes of the divine continue to be commemorated through mechanism. This watch depicts an animated scene of Gabriel's message to Mary that she will be impregnated with the Christ child, a very common theme in the church. Likely to be mid 18th century, this would actually be something that you might encounter if you lived in the 1600s and visited a church. We saw the development of pen cylinders beginning in the early part of the 18th century and people began to design automata that actually enacted the tax they were previously appeared to perform. In 1723, we have clockmaker Charles Clay employing the pen cylinder in his organ clocks, also adding a automata to his dials. This clock on the left, like all musical clocks by Clay, was programmed to play tunes by composer George Friedrich Handel. This one was made in 1730. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of these early clocks by Clay is the thought that given Handel wrote and arranged the music for these cylinders that allowed Handel to generate music not previously possible due to the limitation of human hands. We have 10 fingers, therefore only 10 notes. If you have a clock with 28 pipes, you have 28 notes. These clocks effectively could provide the first recordings of a musician given that the songs are programmed and therefore repeatable every time. It's like the first synthesizers. Musicians loved writing for new things. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] Moving on. We have this famous saying of French philosopher, scientist and mathematician Descartes. I know no difference between the machines the craftsman makes and the various bodies nature makes on its own. This signaled a shift in philosophical thinking. Nature and craft became almost synonymous. Nature and the artisan was an image used in medieval times to convey nature's role in a three-tiered system of creation. This included the works of God, nature and human beings. She was portrayed as a finely-dressed woman wielding iron and hammer over an anvil, forging her creations, the trade of the blacksmith. In this hierarchy, she was situated between God and man, a bridge between sacred ideal forms and matter. This was an emblem of a new philosophy, symbolizing man's ability to prove on the materials of nature, matter ennobled by the art through the imitation of the great creator. When Jacques de Faulconcente, a French artist and scientist, made these three automata in the 1730s, he was originally both interested in religious studies and clockmaking. He developed these first mechanical devices that mimicked biological vital functions as such as circulation, respiration, and digestion after learning of anatomy from a surgeon. Two were musicians, a tambourine player and a flutist. The flutists had lips that actually flexed in four directions, delicate, jointed fingers, and lungs made of bellows that gave three different blowing pressures. Its hands were also covered in skin to create the correct pressure needed to play the flute well. It was the first automaton musician that could actually play an instrument, rather than being a music box with a decorative figure. It's apparently possible that you could have brought your own flute, so if you went to visit and see this piece, you brought your own flute, you handed it to Veconsani, put it on the flutist, and it would play it. So hundreds of people would actually travel to see these pieces. Veconsani's third automaton was the notorious defecating duck, while it flapped its wings and cavorted duckishly. Its main attraction was that it swallowed bits of corn and grain and then excreted them at the other end in a changed form. It could even flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate. Although later on, famous magician and clockmaker Robert Houdin would own this piece and reveal it was a fake. Not long after Veconsani gave up making automata, a Swiss clockmaker named Jacquet Dros, also responsible for the invention of singing bird automata, as we know them today, and created three androids, designed in the 1770s. They included a lady, who was a musician, and two little boys, a writer and a draftsman. Like Veconsani's automata, these figures actually perform the acts the automata were previously meant to simulate. Instead of a woman appearing to play the piano, it actually played the piano. The musician was quite complicated, as well as the draftsman. The draftsman actually drew, and the writer could be arranged to write any message up to 40 characters. The writer is considered to be the ancestor of the first programmable computer. This was all done with cams, brass, and steel. The 17th century saw the invention of the magic lantern. This slide from Cooper Hewitt Collection on the left from the 1780s kept up with these fashions in interests of the time. Novelties and toys of this kind were an accessible way to commemorate and disperse popular forms of theater and entertainment. Automata were no exception. This unusual set in the collection animates everything from the Catherine wheels of automata and clocks to fireworks shows and watches. You can see from this print from 1735 by Charles Nicholas Colchon the Younger. It depicts a firework show in Moudin, in which a mechanized firework Catherine wheel is shown adorning the central tower. The Catherine wheel or pinwheel is actually a type of firework, consisting either of a powdered, filled spiral tube or an angled rocket mounted with a pin through its center. When ignited, the energy of the firework not only creates sparks and flame, but cause the wheel to spin, quickly rotate, making this display much more spectacular. The firework is named after St. Catherine of Alexandria, who, according to Christian tradition, was condemned to death by breaking on the wheel. Breaking on the wheel was a method of torture used during public executions from the period of antiquity through the Middle Ages and even into the early modern period. The story is that when St. Catherine touched the wheel, it flew into pieces. Even our fireworks and entertainment were entangled with divine meaning. The triumph of St. Catherine coming to life through a burning wheel miracles born of fire and glitter.  This happened to be an interest of his, and I was quite lucky to actually see one of these shows. He specialized in the recreation of spectacle fireworks, utilizing these early automata. Catherine wheels are a really big part of that. Here is one of the shows on the left, recreated in the style of the 18th century display that's actually shown in the slide from the magic lantern set on the right from Cooper Hewitt. The motifs are classical, and Catherine wheels are used. Continuing the classical style, these 18th century automata clocks by James Cox for the Chinese market utilize imagery of firework displays to produce glittering optical effects. You can also see the obvious similarities in the motifs that have persisted into the 1700s to the piece first conceived by the Islamic scholar Al-Jazari. With animated figures and contra-rotating rods to simulate water, the top is also adorned with an animated variation of the Catherine wheel. As the clock keeps time, there is an elephant at the base whose eyes shift back and forth. The cases in the decoration were quite lavish. Most of the time they had fire-guilding as well. And here is our elephant, who looks quite suspicious, actually. This rendering of the silver swan automaton made in 1773 also by London clockmaker James Cox and his ingenious Belgian apprentice, John Joseph Merlin, shows the swan presented in the classical style with columns and thrown as the central figure in a temple surrounded by mirrors, producing the effect of multiple swans, a display to conjure an audience. In fact, Cox did invite audiences to experience this marvel, any charge for entry. The swan sits in a bed of contra-rotating twisted glass rods, meant to simulate the movement of water. Tiny silver fish swim through them, darting away from the swan as it lowers its head in anticipation of the catch. Three clockwork mechanisms drive the swan. Each is a product of 18th century clockmaking. The first controls the movement of the swan's neck as it rotates, lowers and preens its feathers followed by the miraculous feet of actually catching and gobbling up the fish. The fish and glass rods are manipulated by the second of the movements and the third controls the music of 12 bells and eight tunes which accompany the swan's 42nd performance. Perhaps one of the most beautiful aspects of this piece is that Cox engineered the reflection of the movement of water. If you watch the base of the swan, light shifts and lingers over the surface of the feathers as if the swan were actually floating. Fewing in the vein of wonder, we have Jean-Yu-Jean Robert Houdin who was born in central France in 1805. After graduating from law school, he returned home to follow in his father's footsteps eventually becoming a watchmaker. Yet, fate had a different mind for young Robert whom after purchasing a set of books on clockmaking returned only to find that the shop had mistakenly give him a package containing a two volume set on magic and things were never the same. He began to perform professionally. At one such event, he met the daughter of a renowned clockmaker and the two quickly fell for each other and were married in July of 1830 with Robert adding her name to his own becoming Robert Houdin from then on. The newly weds moved to Paris where Robert Houdin worked in his father-in-law's shop and he continued his career in horology. In addition to his magic, he produced a series of mechanical devices and clocks shown her two examples of his mystery clocks which he invented containing their movements in the base. Houdin's work inspired many fine craftsmen over the ages, two mystery clocks by the French firm Cartier from an exhibition in the Cooper Hewer shown here. The clock on the left is in the tradition of Houdin's clocks with the mechanism in the base and the hands operated via invisible motion work. The clock on the right is an innovation on Houdin's original design. It has an enameled guillochet dial, a descendant craft of ornamental turning and rotating rose diamond stars indicating the hours and the minutes. The secret is in the operation of the hands which appeared to float over the dial. Houdin is generally considered to have been the originator of conjuring in its modern sense. He was the first magician to make extensive use of electricity in his shows. An idea which stemmed from his background as a clockmaker. Nevertheless, he came under intense official scrutiny and even suspicion on the belief that he might have been performing witchcraft. To prove otherwise, he had to reveal many of a secret to the French government and show them that he was actually a horologist. Later, he was hired by the French government to shut down a rebellion thereby saving France from possible ruin. Not many clockmakers can put that on their CV. One of Houdin's most famous tricks which he toured with throughout Europe was the famous mechanical orange tree. This most famous trick was world-renowned. This clip is actually from the Paul Daniels magic show. I highly recommend watching this all the way through. It aired from 1979 to 1992, but during the course of Houdin's magic show, he would take a small and valuable article from an audience member. Perhaps a watch or a very valuable ring and this he would vanish, leaving the audience wondering and wait while he continued the show. At a certain point, this tree which was situated center stage, it would suddenly begin to bloom. Flowers would appear and then oranges. Houdin would take the oranges from the tree to actually prove that these were real oranges that had grown. He would then cut them up and hand them out to the audience members to enjoy. And eventually, once people had enjoyed the oranges and the show moved on a little bit more, the top orange would open and from that top orange would arise a handkerchief that was carried by two mechanical butterflies and thus revealing the object that had been stolen earlier in the performance. So here we see the orange opening. Paul Daniels, very charming British magician is explaining to us what's happening. Here comes the butterflies. And of course, I'm sure the person who ever lost their valuable item was quite relieved to see it's hanging there on this handkerchief, which is why really this trick was so famous. So not only did Houdin inspire Cartier and other firms, but he also inspired the very famous Russian goldsmith to the Tsar Nicholas II, our loved Peter Karl Faberge. Faberge took much of his inspiration from the masterworks of the past, shown here is his orange tree with the singing bird automaton. This was made in 1911 and is really a homage to both Houdin and singing bird inventor Jacque Dros. In 1864, Peter Karl Faberge received tuition from respected goldsmiths in Germany, France, and England. He also attended a course at Schloss Commercial College in Paris and viewed the objects in the galleries of Europe and leading museums before taking over his father's firm, the House of Faberge. The company was also involved with cataloging and repairing objects in the Hermitage during the 1870s. This led Faberge to become well acquainted with the cultural heritage of many generations of craft. Here we can see Faberge's rendition of the famous silver swan automaton. This was so opulent. The swan was actually made of gold and then plated in silver. So 52 jeweled Easter eggs in total were created by Russian jeweler Faberge for the Tsar, the second who had a standing order of two Easter eggs every year, one for his mother and one for his wife. Lucky ladies. This gold egg is covered by a matte lallic enamel with tape lattice which is actually decorated with diamonds. At the top is inscribed diamonds the year 1906. The surprise inside is this beautiful swan which is settled on a large aquamarine that was meant to simulate a lake. Under one wing is the winding aperture for the winding mechanism and when operated the swan spreads its wings and moves its head and neck and moves along the table. A feat of engineering and such a small masterpiece. The swan miniaturized. Okay, well, the last 10 slides were all to get an effort to tie in Faberge so you could see this amazing shampoo bottle. When doing this research I actually came across this product line in the collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was made famous by using the name Faberge. Given that the name had created world renowned brands synonymous with luxury it was picked up and turned into an American cosmetic company in 1964. And obviously of such import that it is now part of a world renowned collection the Smithsonian. Today the name has been rightfully returned to the Faberge family and a Faberge Heritage Council was formed in 2007. Just add the name Faberge and apparently you can conjure the sublime in a shampoo bottle. The addition of Farrah Fawcett doesn't hurt either. Okay, so we've covered the beautiful, the wonderful and the enchanting part of the sublime within the thread of horology. What's amazing is that the Smithsonian collection we have examples of both sides of the sublime. This section, while short, has to do with how science has utilized horological innovation to accomplish some incredible things. Automata were not only used by the church but by kings and sovereigns to demonstrate a kingdom's technological and strategic prowess. If two 16th century kingdoms met at a war table can you imagine how you might feel at the prospect of going to war against a king with a miniature mechanical ship that can roll down a table and shoot tiny cannons. This mechanical nef on the left was likely made by Schlotheim of Augsburg in about 1585 and might have belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II who was depicted in miniature on the ship's throne. Within the hull spring driven clockwork mechanisms operated the Atalmitan figures and provided motion for the machine to run along the table while playing music. Wilston motion, the tops of the four mass and mizons actually rotate. The table nef was a popular design for the period and our mechanical galleon was a lavish example of such. On the right is a print from the collection at the Cooper Hewitt entitled Design for a Nef. It was a ship shaped container for a table decorated with strap work in which set various aquatic scenes at the bow of grotesque mask at the stern two-winged mermaids with crossed arms. This is attributed to lean and 30 of Flemish engraver from 1550. Oftentimes clocks, automata, and ornamental turnings would actually be found side by side in the cabinets of curiosities, of kings. These were objects of prized higher learning. As trans-oceanic travel grew in significance throughout the 17th century, so did the importance of accurate and reliable navigation at sea. Scientists and navigators have been working on the problem of measuring longitude for a long time. While determining longitude was relatively or latitude was relatively easy, early ocean navigators had drawn a dead reckoning to find longitude. This particularly inaccurate on long voyages without the sight of land and sometimes led to tragedy as during the Sicilian naval disaster of 1707 which claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 sailors. The Longitude Act or Queen Anne Act was passed in July of 1714. Well, this was actually defined the challenge of finding longitude at sea. This was solved by John Harrison, a cabinet and clock maker with the invention of the first ship's chronometer H4 shown on the left. The term chronometer was coined from the ancient word chronos, meaning time and meter, meaning counter, and the same year. So today, the title of chronometer has actually come to distinguish a timepiece, just a regular timepiece for its exceptional accuracy. On the right is a late 19th century marine chronometer from the Smithsonian Collection of the National Museum of American History. These chronometers are still used on Cajun today but were largely replaced by global navigation satellite systems. At the same time, the artist Goldsmith Fabergé is building his opulent mechanical masterpieces. We have the onset of World War I. We see the horological mechanisms used in the service of destruction by the mechanical fuse detonator, which is based on a watch mechanism. These were manufactured in many of the main watch companies, including Boliva and Timex, which were leading companies in the defense sector. These detonators were used in both World War I and II and later fuses that were used to detonate the first nuclear bombs were born from that lineage. Pictured here is the explosion at Nagasaki in 1945 from the archives of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The detonation of the nuclear bomb is the first manifestation of man-made existential risk. An existential risk is any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population, leaving survivors without sufficient means to rebuild society to current standards of living. This image from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the right shows Apollo 11 in 1969. The Omega Speedmaster also in the Smithsonian Collection on the left is well known as the first watch on the moon. While it was a precision scientific instrument, it was not instrumental in the moon landing itself. In fact, the electronic timer used on the mission malfunctioned. It was this simple mechanical timer, also in the Smithsonian Collection that was paramount to a successful and safe landing and was made for 60 second and six minute intervals. This timer was later improved upon by Charles Sotter, one of the principal engineers who worked on the Bull of Acutron, the world's first tuning fork watch, a bridge between mechanical and quartz watches. Shown here is the Bull of Acutron space view in its original box in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt. Acutron wrist watches were given to world leaders as presidential gifts and in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared the Acutron to be the official gift of state. By 1967, the only clocks aboard Air Force One and many instrument panel Acutrons were used in military ships and aircrafts. In 1960, NASA asked Bull of it to incorporate Acutron technology into its equipment for the space program. During the early years, Acutron timing mechanisms were used in 46 US space program missions and Acutron watch movement sits on the moon Sea of Tranquility today, an instrument placed there in 1969 by Apollo 11 astronauts, the first man on the moon. Horeological mechanisms once used to detonate bombs are now the fail-safe views in our nuclear devices. The National Nuclear Security Administration in 2011 announced the completion of a larger safety initiative which incorporated fine mechanical instrument into their safety protocol. The mechanical safe army detonator is an extremely intricate nuclear safety component that prevents accidental or unintended detonation of a warhead. Conceived in 2015 and still in the design process, a clockwork rover for Venus was suggested by Jonathan Sotter, a mechatronics engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He was inspired by mechanical computers which use levers and gears to make calculations rather than electronics, specifically the Charles Babbage Difference Machine, a model in the Smithsonian American History Museum is on the left. He also was inspired by the Jacque Adreau's writer automaton and the Antikythera mechanism. This is truly an example of rocket science drawing directly from horological mechanisms of centuries ago to solve modern problems. According to Sotter, by avoiding electronics, a rover might be able to better explore Venus that could last up to a year under extreme conditions that would normally fry electronics. Daytime surface temperatures on Venus reached 864 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. And the surface pressure is 90 times that of it is on Earth's atmosphere at sea level. This is enough to crush most rovers like a tin can. So moving on to the preservation of horology and heritage, human connection and empathy play a significant role in my work since I believe objects can help facilitate empathy. If we can empathize with an object, we can empathize with the person that made it in the past. This act will help build empathy across time. The preservation of cultural heritage is now directly linked to our success as stewards in the future. This is a late 19th century or very early 20th century singing bird box from the Cooper Hewitt Collection, an ancestor of the miniature ivory mechanical singing bird by Jacque Dros. These pieces are incredibly unique. Even though they were mass produced, they were not mass produced the way that we think of mass production today. Their parts are not interchangeable. Housed inside this tortoise case is a small mechanical singing bird. It has lungs and a voice and a story to tell. It is covered in individual feathers, each one painstakingly applied by hand. They're meant to make it sparkle like jewels. Here's another from the Museum of American History. Both of these boxes are exceptionally different in decoration and the birds have their own personality. This one resembling a robin or a scarlet tannager. Taking care of these objects is a challenge and this is where my work as a conservator comes in. So often they are not properly cared for. Today, the skills in resurrecting these relics are just as rare if not rarer than the objects themselves. And we are in a critical time for these pieces. We're facing issues of degradation and whereas the earliest singing birds are over 200 years old. My belief is that the automata should be working. Whether or not they are operated is not the issue, but if you take away the potential for them to run, they lose many of the intangible qualities that make them exemplary creations of human endeavor. That ability to invoke the sublime through wonder and awe to tell their 200 year old message. The mechanisms are quite complicated with over 100 components. Each has its own personality worthy of attention to detail. These birds have real character and countenance. The hands that feathered them shows them how bright those feathers should be, how grand the eyes, how large the pupils. The beak even gives a nod to a certain temperament. I have seen suspicious birds, confused birds, disheveled birds, anxious birds, apathetic birds, joyful birds, and blissful birds. I call that one panic attack. This is an early 20th century unmarked box and it's actually like the one in the Cooper Hewitt Collection. It's in a case of tortoise. And here's another. This one is about 100 years earlier by the Charles Brugier firm in an engine turned and engraved gold case. This one's my favorite. I think that little bird can hold its own next to that pipe organ we listened to earlier. Here we have two examples of engine turning or guilloché on two pieces in the Cooper Hewitt Collection, both by our favorite goldsmith or my favorite goldsmith, Faberge. Many believe that engine turning reaches eight specks with Faberge. The cigarette case on the left is a variation on a basket weave and the pendant on the right is decorated with sun rays. What is interesting about these pieces is the primary purpose of the enamel, while incredibly beautiful and part of the decorative lure is actually to protect the delicate surface of the guilloché. Guilloché is best known for the optical properties it elicits. This is the result of fine, precise cuts in metal of a highly reflective quality. As the surface oxidizes, the guilloché loses this property and it begins to develop a patina. The only way to properly protect it is to seal it from oxygen. Faberge used an incredible array of colorful enamels which made him famous to achieve this. As part of my personal artistic practice and to preserve the skills associated with this part of our cultural heritage, I practice engine turning and teach it in my workshop. Until recently, my workshop was the only place in the world where one could take a course in engine turning. It's currently the only place in North America. This little clip demonstrates how the overlapping cuts actually generate those optical patterns associated with guilloché. In the first instance, a scion wave is phased by 180 degrees and in the second, the wave is actually cut into the surface without phasing, producing an exact image of the wave in an unchanged form. The mystery actually lies in the final design as far as the illusion created by altering the orientation of repetitive cuts of the singular wave form. Ornamental engine turning is a critically endangered craft. In an effort to preservation, I completed a coloring book of 88 unique engine turn patterns in collaboration with ornamental turner Al Collins. Here, instead of cutting the wave form into metal, a pen and paper are used. I completed this work in 2018. It's part of a series of 10 pieces based on the illustrations found in illuminated manuscripts and medieval bestiaries. There are over 100 pieces in Coach Leia, name of this piece, which is made based on an eight-day watch mechanism. I worked with my colleague, Master Goldsmith Philip Peck, to produce this piece in the vein of traditional craft practice. The shell is made of sterling silver and was cast from carved wax and mold. It is operated by a spring. The mechanism is made just from brass and steel. So this piece is actually a homage to this lineage I've been describing. The shell is out of a snail, a creature whose body embodies a perfect mathematical ratio, the golden mean, a manifestation of mathematics, divine knowledge in nature. God is a geometer. It demonstrates the shift in thinking which eventually saw nature as a machine, a mechanical snail. God is a mechanic. The base is ornamentally turned with a figure eight pattern, the practice of sovereigns, and it uses cams to move in a figure eight pattern, a symbol of resurrection associated with snail during medieval times. This is God as a Turner. The pairing of the rabbit and the snail is actually a nod to our dual nature as human beings. Both the rabbit and the snail were seen as sacred animals, both associated with resurrection. At the same time, the snail was seen as a slimy and cowardly creature, the rabbit, lustful and filthy. So the dichotomies of these two creatures, also completely put on these creatures by us, is a symbol of basically their dichotomy and their meaning of being a representation of our dual nature as human beings. You know, the fact that the rabbit is fast and the snail is slow is another representation of our duality. I'd like to leave you with two inspiring pieces in the collection at Cooper Hewitt. The first is this lamp designed by Issey Miyake. The Midori lamp is one of nine collapsible table floor and hanging lamps created by Miyake and his reality lab research and development team. It was created using mathematical principles and algorithmic design utilizing 3D geometric principles. According to Miyake, the project comes from the intersection of creativity and mathematics. The Cooper Hewitt acquired it in 2013. This revolutionary watch in the collection at Cooper Hewitt, known as the Dot Watch, has a dynamic Braille pin display and is the world's first Braille smartwatch. Traditionally, watches with a visually impaired, utilized or movable crystal so one could feel where the hands were on a dial. If you know as much about watches as I do, you know that is not a good idea for a long-term solution. The Dot Watch has two modes, Braille with the traditional Braille numbers and the tactile for non-Braille readers. Shown here is the timer function in tactile mode. The Dot Watch also receives text messages from a smartphone. I don't know about you, but this watch gives me hope for the horological innovation in the future for the good of mankind. Where would you get these things we've had? That's my job. I know, but you're in Seattle. A lot of my clients send these things to me, so I travel back and forth quite a lot. I hand courier things or people send them. Yeah, because I... See me after the talk. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Are there other people throughout the world doing this work or are you the end of the line? Well, I hope I'm not the end of the line because that would be really sad.  There are people that do work on these types of objects. I am the only person that's actually studied watchmaking, clockmaking, and conservation, so I'm the world's only horological conservator that's done training both clock and watchmaking. I also specialize in automata and mechanical music objects. Certainly, there are craftsmen and clockmakers. I have a lovely group of colleagues that I work with on a regular basis that do lots of different types of work. But I would say as far as this particular niche of objects there, you could count them on one hand. I'm just wondering if young people, kids, teenagers, early 20s, are they interested in this whole field or at least learning about objects like this? Well, I was quite happy that I have two young students. I have a 10-year-old boy who I tutor in engine turning. He comes in and boy, he's good. He could really go on to work for a watch firm or something doing geisha decoration on dials. I have another student who recently started doing watchmaking, and I found that what's interesting is I think kids today do not have the experience of working with their hands. They're losing the ability to actually understand materials, so they don't really know how to use tweezers to pick up a tiny screw. They're having to develop these skills since they're not used to doing it in school maybe anymore. But I would say certainly people are interested, I think what's challenging about this field is that for a 10th, maybe not even a 10th of the time that you would put into learning this craft, you could go to school and go into engineering. You could go into video games. You would make so much more money doing that kind of thing than I do. I've spent my entire life. I've spent over 10 years devoted to this craft. I was in school for nine years. I don't take a huge paycheck at the end of the month, like somebody that might design video games, but I find my work so rewarding. There is something so precious about making something and have it be a tactile object that I can say, I made this. It's not something that exists in a digital space. It's something that's there after I'm gone. I'm contributing to a much bigger story that way, and I'm carrying on a lineage that I know connects me and people hundreds and hundreds of years ago.


Okay, the shirt was sent to me to review. This is by Khufandi. Khufandi Hawaiian shirts. Okay, very nice, beautiful shirt. I like the way it fits. This is a medium. I'm 5'6", about 160 pounds. A little bit of a gut. But it's forgiving. It's not that tight. You can still move around. Okay, it's not riding up too high. Okay, pretty cool little Hawaiian shirt. Not too loud, loud enough, right? What do you think?


Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. The mighty banks of the River Thames, down at the docklands in London. This is theCUBE, we're live here at HPE Discover 2016. Chris Cozopis here, the vice president of marketing at HPE Aruba. Chris, good to see you again. Yeah, great to be here. So good, the keynote this afternoon was all Aruba all the time.  Thank you. Came across great, crisp story. I think the audience liked it, they stayed, place was packed. Yeah, yeah. You know, day two, sometimes you lose people, but you know, they were there for the duration, so congratulations. Thank you. So, take us through sort of the highlights of the keynotes and then we'll get into it. Yeah, well so today was really about talking about the intelligent edge. And obviously for HPE, we have a rich history of hybrid IT, right? And we talked about that extensively yesterday, but ultimately it's about how do we extend that out into the edge. So the new focus for HPE is really all about the intelligence at the edge. And you know, the way that we define this is ultimately around this concept of convergence of people, places, and things, right? So a lot of people, a lot of things now coming onto the network with IoT and of course the place where they are, right? And ultimately for us, it's about how do we capture insights from the convergence of people, places, and things and then use those insights to abstract information and context that's relevant to transform experiences. Because at the end of the day, information or insights doesn't do us any good unless we can do something with it. So that's really our whole push around the intelligent edge is people, places, and things, insights, and then transforming experiences. And that's what today's keynote was about. Now from the Aruba perspective, what new products, what new technologies are you developing to enhance this goal? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, our mandate I would say for the company is a number of things. First of all, it's extensive connectivity, right? So we start at the foundation around how do we connect, whether it be wirelessly or wired, right? Or in many cases, extend connectivity over third-party networks as well. Think of like emerging IoT networks like Laura or think of LTE or cellular networks. And once we have that extensive connectivity set, robust, secure, reliable, it then all becomes about the software. And at the heart of things, HPE Aruba is really a software-defined company. I mean, we think about this as the software layer that essentially can be modified, changed, opened up to a broad base of ecosystem partners to then deliver apps and services. So I've got my little list I was talking to you before about let's try to make it real and sort of help people understand what we're talking about here. Indoor navigation is something we've been talking about people don't want to know, here's the cube, boom, there it is. Tracking of assets, employee tracking, proximity services. You want to give somebody an offer when they're coming by a certain retail operation. Keyless access, these are just four or five of the ones that I've been picking out over the last couple of days. And there are many more. So talk about how organizations are applying these attributes and how it's changing their workplace. Yeah, absolutely. So the workplace used to be just about driving employee productivity, right? You come into your space, you work from nine to five and then you leave, right? Increasingly now with the power of location, right? Which is the service that's essentially at the foundation of all of this. We can now start to personalize your experience, right? So the whole concept of wayfinding getting from point A to point B is personal to you, right? That's your wayfinding, that's your directions that you're engaged. The idea of promotional push notifications or zone-based marketing, for example, is personalized to you. Again, based on your location. So what HPE Aruba provides is the infrastructure and the apps and software that makes that possible, right? So it starts with the concept of Bluetooth, BLE Beacons, allowing us to get that real accurate location capabilities. But then, ultimately, the intelligence and logic behind this is really through an open-based software platform that works with the broad base of partners. So let me give you an example. So we work with a partner called Robin, right? And think about Robin as, in many respects, the Uber experience of conference rooms, right?  The same with Robin provides that app experience within the facility, within the workplace, that allows you then to see and locate conference rooms that are near you. Now we take it a step further. Once you enter the conference room, we know your presence because we know your location. So we have the ability then to change the reservation of that conference room to make it now booked and ensured and take that even a step further to actually kickstart the collaboration experience with Skype for Business or other collaborative apps that now connecting all the people that you had predefined as being part of that experience. So this is kind of the example of workplace experience and transforming that workplace environment based on the idea now that I have this personalized information about you, your user identity, where you are, the app that you're using, pulling that all together. Again, I mentioned people, places, and things and you can start to see that's a real tangible example. Let's talk competition. Now you're up against the gorilla, Cisco, and I'm sure in just about every sales situation, what is your distinguishing, what are your distinguishing features? Yeah, the biggest one and very simple is you can come to HPE and get a single end-to-end solution and what that means is you can start really with a single architecture. So start from one access point. If you're a very small business or if you're just doing a proof of concept, you can start with a single access point and then grow that over time up to thousands of access points, all with the same system, the same management structure. What you'd find with the gorilla down the road is effectively multiple different architectures that actually are not interoperable one to the other. So you may actually, as a smaller company or in a branch environment, have deployed one system and then you're stuck when you need to integrate that with a larger campus environment or try to upgrade that as well. With HPE Aruba, it's a single seamless infrastructure. The other point I will say is we fundamentally believe in openness here and I've already kind of alluded to this idea of open APIs, but the power and the speed of innovation should be at the speed of the ecosystem, not at the speed of one single vendor. And so this is a key defining differentiator for HPE Aruba is the openness, the open APIs, working with the broader ecosystem, whereas again, down the road, you'll find much more of a focus on end to end closed systems as opposed to that open structure. I want to be sure I understand what you mean by openness. Now does that mean you are adopting open standards wherever possible or that you are publishing your APIs? Yeah, so both actually. So we are always predisposed to adopting standards and actually we drive much of the standards process in general, right, as it relates to infrastructure standards and software standards. But in this specific case, because we're talking much more about software defined as kind of the key point that most customers are focused on, the APIs are really that key differentiator and then the ecosystem of partners that we bring into that environment as well. Does software defined ultimately make the hardware a non-issue? Not entirely, no, because there is a lot that we do in hardware, especially when you're talking about connectivity that's very important, right? So take for an example, an access point. You could go and you could buy a consumer grade AP for $30 off the shelf and bring that into an enterprise environment. But the second that that microwave oven turns on and it emits radiation and interference in that environment, your whole network is gone. Even if you're running a little bit thin layer of software here on top of that, right? So we invest a lot in R&D in that hardware side for things like radio optimization and RF propagation, right, that is so critical. And that extends really from all of our access points into our switching infrastructure. But then ultimately I will say it is true that we want to abstract much of that complexity from the view of the customer so that ultimately the infrastructure is there, it's functional, it delivers all that it needs to and then really it's just programmable to adapt to the changes that that customer has. Chris, you were talking before about openness versus sort of closed, proprietary, whatever terms we use. Openness has a flip side, which is choice means a lot of choices, a lot of complexity, a lot of permutation. How are you addressing that? Yeah, I think, first of all, we have a very, very strong focus on industry segments, right? And addressing kind of who are the key customers that are really working with us? And I would say that heritage of vertical focus comes actually really out of the wireless business because if you think about how wireless started, you know, it was in the inventory management sector and retailer, it was in the distribution sectors with barcode scanners, right? So already wireless emerges from a very kind of vertically kind of focused environment. So that kind of heritage moves up into the present time where, you know, when we're talking about, you know, asset tracking in hospitals, right? That's a very industry specific type of use case. So we spend a lot of time articulating use case and solutions, documenting those solutions, working with our ecosystem of value-added resellers and distributors to make sure that as they go to market, they're not just taking a product or they're not just taking a piece of software, they're taking an actual documented defined solution and representing that to the customer is something that can solve their problems. Okay, we talked about workplace transformation. Let's talk about brands. So, you know, we talked about digital transformation a lot at these events. And it seems as though a lot of the brands have sort of trying to get back some of the advantage that they used to have. The brands used to have all the information about pricing and competition the web changed that obviously. And now the consumer has the advantage. And it feels like the early days of mobile were all about the brands trying to collect some information not really putting the customers first. And I think brands are starting to realize, wow, we have to actually put the customers first. You seem to be at the center of that. How are brands taking advantage of your capabilities to really deliver value and obviously help themselves? Yeah, yeah, this is a really rich kind of topic here on this one. So if you think about, let's take retail as kind of a first stop of brand discussion, right? So you saw the shift in the retail industry from brick and mortar to digital, right? Everybody raced to e-commerce and to go digital. The interesting thing is now that most or many kind of smart retailers are realizing it's actually about how you bridge the physical with the digital. And let me kind of explain this. So the power of Wi-Fi in an on-premise environment allows us actually to understand who has come into our venue and actually where they have gone. We have a large retail mall customer that 50% of their interactions with their customer actually happened over Wi-Fi based on the fact that that customer had downloaded one of their apps or their app, their shopping app. Every time that customer came into the shopping center, they could identify the time when they entered, when they left, and actually where that customer went. And then map that back to actually their digital presence. And so one example was customer came in, went actually to the hair salon, went back at home that night, googled or searched on their shopping center website, found a different hair salon, and then two days later, went back to that different hair salon. What do you conclude? Customer wasn't happy with their first experience, right? So here you see an example of how this brand can actually capture digital information with physical information, blend that to get a much richer profile of that customer, ultimately then delivering much more value and engendering more loyalty. Now using that example you just gave, where does Aruba sit in that? Are you span that whole realm of that application? So we play predominantly in the presence in the physical environment, right? And so what we provide through an analytics capability, so an analytics engine, is the ability for our customers to track through Wi-Fi that connectivity experience and to aggregate that, right? So nobody's personal data is ever compromised or delivered. It's viewed in an aggregate that we can then pass on to the retailer in this case, right? So we provide that physical connectivity and the analytics that go behind that. Okay, third layer is operational, right? So the stuff that maybe not everybody sees and touches. So how are you affecting that? I mean obviously IOT plays into that. Very much so. But let's unpack that a bit. Yeah, so this is a, as you say, it's kind of an area, it's a bit more in the back office from the consumer side, but the key thing that's happening in this environment is really a convergence of what we call IT and OT, or operational technology. And think of OT as what's happening on the shop floor, what's happening in an oil rig or a gas environment, or all of these very kind of operationally-centric environments, industrial-centric environments. And the reality is there have been things that have existed in those environments for decades, right? Technology is not new in that environment. What's new is this convergence with IT. And the fact that by adding sensors or temperature gauges or thermometers or all of these various kind of sensor capabilities, we can actually bring in more diagnostics about what's happening in that operational environment. So let's take kind of actually what was demonstrated in the keynote today around an actual production flow where we can detect anomalies and actually predict that there's about to be an outage based on sensors that are now in that production flow feeding back data into the network. And what's unique about HPE is our ability actually to leverage the heritage of strong computing storage from a data center perspective and extend that to the edge through a new product portfolio called Edgeline as a new solution said. So that when all of that data is being generated in real time out at the edge, this production flow, we can process it without the need to backhaul to a central data center or to a cloud environment somewhere. So here you have the idea of sensors and things being connected through a network, process that data with analytics and compute power right at the edge to make sure that we have some sort of outcome then that can avoid potential downtime or problems. What about the power issue? As you get more and more things connected, a lot of these devices will be small. It's not going to be practical to connect them to a power source. Is that an area that you're working to solve as well? I'm happy you brought this up because just today we introduced a new product that's actually an IoT ready switch that incorporates power directly into the switch that senses the thing that is on the other side and can actually tailor down or tailor up the power based on what the thing needs. So if you have a temperature gauge is going to draw much less power than say an IP phone, well for example.  And clearly today most companies are very concerned with their green initiatives and so this gives us a way to scale the power budget much more effectively because as you say all of these new things coming into this environment. So this is our new 2540 switch that was actually just launched today. What are you seeing in terms of the organizational issues around IT and OT? Yeah. The IT and OT probably don't talk that much. What are some of the best practices that you guys are seeing and are recommending? Yeah, this is also a big one and here you have two domains that really traditionally have existed apart and now are being brought together. And so I think that this is definitely it's an area where we're learning as we go through, right? And a lot of our approach to market is actually to work with the operational technology suppliers. Companies like PTC, companies like OSISO, companies like National Instruments because these companies have been working in the OT domain for years, right? And they understand those buyers, they have the trust and confidence of the OT individual. But ultimately working with those partners, bringing in our own capabilities around edge compute and networking, packaging that up as a solution and going to market together allows us to break down some of those silos, right? If we are able to break those silos down from a technology perspective, ultimately that makes it easier for the two constituents to come together on the customer side. So what's the sequence?  Yeah, absolutely. It's about unleashing all the insights and obviously the business does need to have some understanding about what it's trying to accomplish, right? Because as you start to connect all these things, the possibilities start to become greater and greater. And this is really where HPE strength within our technical services capability comes to bear, right? So we offer a breadth of consulting and planning services around IoT that allow us to help guide the customer through some of that exploration and also some of the pitfalls that we've seen with other customers. So equally as important as technology is the services element. I have to ask you this. We're 20 years into consumer grade Wi-Fi, widespread adoption of Wi-Fi. In my experience, in most of the hotels and coffee shops that I use, the quality of Wi-Fi is still terrible. Why is that? Because they're not using HPE or Rupa. That's too simple answer. Talk about it. Simple answer, right? From a journalist, my goodness. Is there, are there certain structural barriers that are just really hard to overcome? So I think this comes back to the discussion that you're asking me around hardware, right? And kind of, so if companies or venues go out, Wi-Fi is not all created equal, right? And that is very much the case. So there is a lot to be said about the intelligence that goes into the radios in terms of how signals propagate, the ability to detect interference and to mitigate around that. A lot of the automation there. Those are our enterprise class features. And when companies go out and they buy consumer grade products off the shelf that are designed for a home, not designed for a whole bunch of people coming into a venue or a facility and changing environments and things going on and off, that is the challenge that we see. But I will say we've seen definitely the quality of experience for Wi-Fi grow by leaps and bounds relative to how it has been. I don't think you could imagine today going into a hotel and not having Wi-Fi contributing. And it's not your Wi-Fi at this venue, is that correct? We're working on that, it's true, it is not. Okay, good. Wi-Fi's not so great here. So glad to hear it's not a rubo. But as we were saying, we've done an event at Levi Stadium and Wi-Fi was amazing. So we know that's a reference account of yours. Absolutely. Good deal. All right, Chris, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Paul and I will be right back after this short break. This is HPE Discover, live from London.


And welcome to Lady Aiden. Hi everybody and welcome to my desk. It's me, Lady Aida. Got my hair dead. Last weekend we were out as a family, but we're back and back to hacking on electronics. Do you have any news or updates, Mr. Lady? Yeah, regular shows this week and more tons of new products. Lots of surprises, big week for us. Also having some visitors in town, so maybe we'll have some extra content. It is a good week. Okay, let's take it. So two weeks, two weekends ago, wow, it feels like it was months, but it's two weekends ago, I was still working on the Teddy Ruxman hacking, trying to get audio working. I think we had gotten the eyes modified using our Ruxman analyzer script, but I was still working on getting the audio working, which was like kind of complicated. And then not this Wednesday, but the 10 days ago Wednesday is when I got the audio working in the morning. And I don't see which version this is. So now, let's get this.  So now I've got it playing custom audio. So that's a song, Iggy, sticky bubble gum that our Ada Kitto likes to listen to. So that'll be funny if we load it on the bear and it's just kind of very fast encoding. That just shows that you can actually get audio encoded and working on here. And that was a long process. I think last week, I was talking about how, sorry, two weekends ago, I was working on running this library file on a Raspberry Pi and it wasn't running. And so I was using Udra to decompile it and like try to change this flag. And then the audio that came out of it, I'll look at it again, at the time I wasn't able to get it to play on the bear like it came out all like squiggly and weird. I'm still trying to figure out why some encoded libraries are working and some aren't. But I kept, you know, I wasn't willing to give up foolishly or not. So I kept Googling around and I ended up, you know, the computer, I'll show what I ended up finding. So a lot of like reverse engineering is like you just keep searching for stuff. So, you know, searching and searching, you know and I have this notes file even of like all the stuff I tried and like I tried this library and that library and like decompine on this, decompine on that. And in the end, what I found was there was in a repository that the SDK repository for the Sonic's chip set had a zip file and in the zip file there was a library, a different library file for Android. And that file I Googled around for it's called libaudio32encoder.so and it was a Java library for Android. And what's fascinating is we actually have an Android developer on, you know, on staff on contract. Antonio, he's written the Android applications that we use for like Bluetooth Connect and PyLeap and all that stuff.  And he did and he actually wouldn't, I try again, it tried putting it on the bear, it didn't work. And so we were like kind of annoyed and it was like, why isn't it working? It's like, it's a Sonic's SDK, this is a Sonic's chipset, why is it working? But when I searched GitHub for this file, the libaudio32encoder, I came up with, it came up this GitHub repo. And I was like, ooh, Cloudpats. And then it was like hacking unicorns. And it was like some, so the, the blog post doesn't exist. But if you Google, like, you know, the, he, this guy worked for a company that was in bought by Accenture. So like goody for him. But, you know, I wanted to see what the original article was. And it was, it was all kind of, you know, similar. I was like, okay, there's this toy. And it uses like the Sonic sound processor. So that's good. And it has Nordic NRF, which is actually similar, right? Remember, we looked at the bear inside either on DeskGladiator or in My Little Hacker. And we saw that it had the Sonic ships and NRF. So I was like, okay, maybe it's the same company that did it.  And then, you know, very similar, like commands that were sent, but I don't really care about the Bluetooth stuff. But then somewhere down here, he's like, he's like, oh, there is this Kodak.  Why don't you just use the G7 221.1 NXC Kodak? And it's not, it's not exactly the same. I tried the standard Kodak and the Kodak. I mean, I'll keep looking at the Kodak now that I've gotten something working, but it's not the exact Kodak. But he did open up the Android app for Cloudpets. So if you go to like Google, use it for Cloudpets, APK. There's these like APK download, you know, like the archive sites and they kind of, they store every APK and you can download APK. So this is the Android app that originally was for this toy. And then, hold on, I don't think I actually downloaded it. Okay, so now I download, so it's really big. So an APK with the Android app that's running on, I guess with this other toy, this magical unicorn with Bluetooth, you record the audio on the Android app, you say like, hi, I'm a little unicorn and you press go and it codes it into this audio 32 Kodak, sends it over Bluetooth though, I don't think it's compressed. So it's, you know, the Kodak is a compression Kodak.  It'll do like a 25% compression. And then the device will play that audio, you know, the toy will play the audio clip. So what you realize is that when you open up the XAPK or the APK inside is a Android linked library called lib audio 32 and code. And if you're on Android and you're running Python on Android, which, you know, it's just Linux, you can run Android on it. So I'll show this in the folder. So this is the cloud pets app. And then if you rename this zip, because they're just zips and I've already downloaded it before. So it's like, you've already done that. There's another APK. So you can download the second APK. There's an APK inside the APK. And then you rename this zip and then in here is library class. So the library files in here, so there's like, you know, there's, and there isn't x86 unfortunately, there's only ARM A, B, Y, A, B, I, and ARM A, B, I, V, seven, A. So two ARM cores. So this library is an encoder that will let you encode audio into the correct format. And so this person, PDJ Stone, wrote an encoding script, a Python script that opens this DLL in Python. It's a C types DLL. And then what was really nice was like, oh, hey, look, there's that AU, like that's familiar and the sample rate. Okay. Like all of this header like looks correct. So it's kind of getting excited. Cause it was like, ooh, this seems like it's the correct encoder. Like there's apparently a couple of things called all your 32, but maybe this is the right one. So then the trick was this was written seven years ago. And so I was like really excited. I was like, okay, I'm going to like, you know, I had a Raspberry Pi and I saw Android on it. There's a version of Android called, hold on, all these likes. LiniageOS, I saw LiniageOS and I'm like booting my Raspberry Pi. And I'm like, I'm like ready to, you know, I install Python on the Arduino. That's how the Raspberry Pi running Android. And it doesn't work because what happens is, you know, and this is like how you install it and you're like, okay, my Android might four and I want it. And you end up getting this error, which is, sorry, I'm in the editor mode, that it has text relocations and you can't run it on anything before, sorry, after the API level 23. So basically this, when this person wrote this Bluetooth toy hacking script and that app was written, it was for Android 5. It was like a very early version of Android and you're not permitted to run that code anymore on modern Android and there's no like workaround. It's like deep inside the operating system will not let you run it.  And like I still have like a Nexus 7. I have two, I have one of each edition, I think. And I did get it running. I charged it, effectively reset it. I ADB'd in, I installed Turmux, which is the Linux for Android. And thankfully Turmux has a version they still publish for Android 5. And then I was able to like log in and then I was able to ADB the files over and through the command line, I was able to run the script and it complains. It says like, hey, it has text relocations. This is wasting time that it's security and it's a bad idea, but the code runs. And it generated a bin file. I took that bin file, I pasted it into an existing story file for the bear. And then I put on the bear and it worked. And so that was like magical. So the only thing was is that like, you have to have a Nexus 7 and you have to go through this ordeal. And like Nexus 7s are not like fast Android machines. Like, you know, even running the stock Android that it came with, you're like clicking and then you're like, I'm waiting patiently.  There's a reason they gave them away. I don't think anyone bought a Nexus 7. So what I've been doing since then, and now I can code audio. So it's like, we can code audio. The rest of the file is parsable. The eyes can be modified. So what we wanna do next is two things. One, make it so you don't need Nexus 7 to do this encoding because even though everyone has one, I mean, I talk to some people on my team and they're like, I threw mine into the ocean and I'm like, well, okay, cool. Or they lost it or they threw it away, which you're not supposed to do. You're supposed to keep it because you can't get to sanctuary unless you have your Nexus 7 when you die. So the next trick is how can I get it so you don't need a Nexus 7? So I've been documenting this as an unpublished guide. But the next step is that you can run Android 5 on a Raspberry Pi 2. There is a build available that you can download and I have like an image file that you can use. And you can ADB into your Raspberry Pi on your desktop. And that worked also, it actually wasn't too bad. It wasn't very slow at all. And you can get the files on and off and you can do the encoding and all the marked up table stuff. But the problem is that Android 5 wasn't available for the Pi 3 or Pi 4. Like for whatever reason, it was only built for the Pi 2 and you can't, it's the kernel, it's like Pi 2 kernel. So then I tried a Android 5.1 emulator through the Android SDK.  Like you can emulate ARM32, but it's like even more painful than the Nexus 7. It just takes minutes to get anything done. So that was not a good solution. But then I kind of like put this bug into Antonio's ear, our Android developer. And he was like suddenly like, this is really interesting. Like, okay, I like how do you, how are we gonna get this working? And he realized that if you look at the author of Cloud Pets app, Spiral Toys, and actually I kind of took screenshots, I'll just do this. So they made this app called Cloud Free, Cloud Pets Free, and this thing called Toy Fight. This is actually kind of interesting. This company, like I read about it and they like they kept changing their name and like they were totally like going to make like the future of toys and then like they went on business. And then this Wiggy toy app is like some weird Bitcoin thing. Anyways, but they did the Cloud Pets app and that was again only Android 5 compatible because the library was very old because it was like about in 2018 or 2015. And they never, this didn't get updated. And then they formed another company and they made another toy called like the Wiggy, Wiggy Bank.  So this toy also you would like, you could send it audio over Bluetooth. And so Antonio's like, oh, maybe like this other app, the Wiggy toy app has in more modern, it's from 2020. So he downloaded the APK and opened it up and realized that there was a post API 23 version of the .so files. So now what I've got on here on my desk, which I'll show on the overhead somehow.  There is, this is my, this SCP was winning CircuitPython, but it's no longer, this is a Raspberry Pi 4 running, maybe you can go to me full, can you put, go to me full screen? Yeah.  And I've got it running Termax on here and I swapped in that new .so file, the link library that is now modern Android compatible, and I'm running SSHD on here and then if you go back to the computer, what's nice is that now I can SSH and SCP, and so I messaged into the Android, enjoy you name all, so this is a Android builds from like 2020, I think it's maybe the Android 11 or Android 9 or something, but I've got the Cloud Pets, I guess I get status. So, I've updated the lib audio 32 encoder file and now I can encode audio, so this was the way file that Mr. Lee gave me of the song and then I've converted it to a binary file and then I SCP it off and then I can paste it into the story file for the bear and it works, so that's way easier than, to be honest, dealing with Android phones. You can do it on any Android phone, but it's kind of nice, I just have ethernet plugged into my Raspberry Pi, a SSHN and it's good to go. So, I'm still working out different ways for, like at least now you can use any Raspberry Pi, you don't need a Pi 2, you can use any Raspberry Pi, that's modern, to run Android on it and you can run the script. It is a skin arm, it's only arm 32 and arm 64, but if you're on a Mac, a modern Mac, it is arm 64 compatible and so you can, I'm running Windows on an x86, but if I had a Mac laptop or a Mac computer, which I do have one, you can run the Android emulator with an Android studio and boot up a, like here I've got a virtual device, you can boot up a virtual device, so you could actually do this all within software, but unfortunately emulating the ARM core on the next day, six, six, totally sucks. And he's just QEMU and then it's not very fast and you can't run QEMU without like the whole Android thingamermob, so I should delete this because this totally didn't work out, tried to like emulate a pixel too and it like, it didn't even, it just crashed. It was like, I can't do this, I'm giving up, I'm leaving. So I learned a lot, but we didn't get audio working. The only thing that's a little sad is the audio quality isn't as good, it's 16 kilobit per second, not 32, because that encoder was meant to do only Bluetooth low energy transmission, not drag and drop over USB, but it's a lot easier to, once you have something working, work your way back into getting better quality and like easier functionality, and so you can see I'm like sort of filling out this guide, I'm like, okay, how I can make it much easier to do a conversion because once you have an easy way to do the conversion, then I can look at this like G7221 codec thing because I might be able to figure out what tweaks they made to whatever table or whatnot to get it working and then I can run like anything on any computer because it would just be a simple executable that just takes in the way file and then gives you like the highest quality audio out. So it's happening, but it's happening slowly, I'm kind of like redoing a ton of work, but the cool stuff is that there's, I've seen so many people be like, oh, I wish I had an audio 32 encoder decoder, at least now there's gonna be a documented way of doing it and I think that'll be really cool. All right, so that's what's on my desk. It's like bears, all bears all the time. So let's go to the great search. Let's do the great search. The great search brought to you by didyki and Anna Frith, thank you, didyki. Every single week, Lady Data, user power of engineering to help you, yes, you find the things you are looking for Lady Data. What is on the great search this week on didyki.com? Okay, so this week on the great search, we had a request and I love requests, so send them in. So Puppy2331Puppy asks us to please find them in analog magnet sensor. So we've covered magnetometers before where you have I squared C or SPI output. You know, I have a couple of favorite ones like the TMag series, I think. I'll show it, this is an I squared C Hall Effect 3D sensor so it can read magnets but it's digital output and it's surface mount. So I'm gonna guess that this person wants a through-hole, easy to use analog output magnet sensor that is, because they said analog, I'm assuming they don't want just a switch. It's easy to do a switch where you just detect whether the magnet is nearby or not because it turns on and off a switch. There's read relays that do it. Those are super inexpensive, they're mechanical. There's Hall Effect sensors that have digital output or open drain output, but they specifically said analog. So let's find a magnet sensor that will read north or south on a magnet and give you an analog voltage depending on how close it is and that will be used for proximity sensing. So we're just gonna start by searching for magnetic sensors and that is a whole category. So there's a couple different categories available here. So we don't want switches. So there are solid state switches that are not mechanical, they're not reads. They're not read relays. They're not like a mechanical switch. They do use the Hall Effect but they have a switch output. So it's like digital output even though it's not a digital protocol. We're not gonna do that. There's also modules that are like fully enclosed.  Even if it's not a 3D, they're kind of called compass ICs. Okay, so first up, we definitely let's put back to stats. We can see all of our options, so many options. So let's go with active and let's go with through hole. Remember we wanted a through hole part for this person. And I want some that's in stock and I'm gonna exclude the marketplace products. You can see like just before even getting into like our specs it's already down to, you know, about a hundred options. Okay, then the output types. So remember they wanted analog output. So, you know, there's this dash and all that means a Wheatstone bridge would mean that it's a resistor so you'd have to like do the Wheatstone bridge amplification. I wanted something that does require external circuitry. PWM I'm assuming they don't want because PWM is hard to read because you have to read the pulse width. I'm assuming they really do want analog current or voltage. The reason I say current is because you can always put a resistor to create a voltage from the current. So let's see how this goes. So let's apply. Okay, cool. Let's see a couple of options we've got here. So these are looking really good. There's these through-hole components. Let's next up do voltage. So they didn't specify a voltage and they didn't specify a sensing range. That is actually kind of important because depending on how strong your magnet is you might want to either measure the Earth magnetic field or a weak magnet. It could be like under those kind of like fridge magnets or it could be a really strong rare Earth magnet. They didn't say, but let's do the voltage supply first. So I want it to work with three volts and five volts. That's kind of my preference. So let's look, this is within range. And I'm just shift clicking to pick up all of these three to five volts and three to higher volts. Versions now are kind of cut our options in half. And then the next question is the range, the sensing range. Again, they didn't mention it, but I'm going to say maybe plus minus 20 and above so fairly strong. You want to have it be the range of your sensor should be matched to the magnet because you don't want it to saturate if it's too high and you don't want to have the voltage kind of go up and down enough to be measurable by your microcontroller when it's low. So let's let's look here. Okay, so we're down to 40. I feel like that's a good place to start. So let's look at pricing and see where we end up. So one thing I notice is that the kind of the front the front page of Digina when I search by price is all this DRV 55X series and that's kind of promising. There's a lot of them in stock they seem very popular and they're 50 cents a piece. So let's look at one of these, you know, looks like it's DRV 5053 and then letter, letter, letter. So in the data sheets, and a bipolar hall effect sensor. That sounds right. Linear output, Hall of Sensor. Looks like there's a bunch of different sensitivities available. So it can be as little as 11 millivolts per millitecela. So that's good. If you have a very strong magnet to 90 millivolts per millitecela, that's if you have a very weak magnet available in both surface mount, sought 23 and sought to 92. So through hall, see wide voltage range, no regulator required, kind of nice. And what's neat is it's stabilized. The analog, the zero to two volt analog output responds linearly to the applied magnetic flux density and distinguishes the polarity detection as well. So that's kind of nice. So you can detect whether it's north or south. A lot of hall effect sensors will only detect one like either it's south measuring or north measuring. It doesn't tell you which one. What's nice about this is it looks like the output, which is two volts. So it's zero to two volts output. It starts with the strongest north is up to two. And as it goes down to the south side of the magnet, it will go down to V-min, which is probably around zero. Sounds like V-min. And it looks like there is, oh, you can get it in negative or positive polarity sensitivity and that they'll just be the opposite way.  Let's see in V-min. They don't actually see what V-min is, but I bet it's just zero volts. I think they're just saying like zero. Okay, output voltage point two volts to 1.8 volts. So yeah, it's about zero to two. And at zero millitesla, like so no magnetic field detected at all, it's about one volt. So, you know, it sounds pretty good. You can use this with three volts logic. So your feather or your Raspberry Pi Pico, or you can use it with an Arduino.  When you get the analog reading out, you'll have to like kind of scale it down to get to the zero to two volt range. But this looks pretty good and it's available in a lot of different sensitivities and looks pretty solid and it's really inexpensive. So this is going to be my pick for the great search and there's a ton in stock. So you're in luck. If you need it, if you happen to need 7,668, go to town. Great search. And that's our show for this evening. Thanks so much for joining us. We've seen everyone during the week and more. Got that teddy bear at home. Or if you need to get one off eBay, get ready cause it'll be a lot of fun stuff to do. Yeah, I'm slowly but surely writing this like massive guide and we're also going to be experimenting with how to do digital puppetry to get the mouth to move as if it's singing so it like looks like it's doing the right thing. Although we've noticed that as long as it's moving while there's audio, it doesn't seem to, your brain kind of fills it up. Okay. Thanks everybody. Have a great night. Bye everybody.