A bit rococo for my tastes but the mechanism is amazing. Built by Abraham and David Roentgen:
More at BLDGBLOG:
Roentgen Objects, or: Devices Larger than the Rooms that Contain Them
An extraordinary exhibition closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, featuring mechanical furniture designed by the father and son team of Abraham and David Roentgen: elaborate 18th-century technical devices disguised as desks and tables.
First, a quick bit of historical framing, courtesy of the Museum itself: "The meteoric rise of the workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711–1793) and his son David (1743–1807) blazed across eighteenth-century continental Europe. From about 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s, the Roentgens' innovative designs were combined with intriguing mechanical devices to revolutionize traditional French and English furniture types."
Each piece, the Museum adds, was as much "an ingenious technical invention" as it was "a magnificent work of art," an "elaborate mechanism" or series of "complicated mechanical devices" that sat waiting inside palaces and parlors for someone to come along and activate them.
Just wow - pretty amazing for late 1700's manufacture.
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