Our visit yesterday to Monticello was surprising in a number of ways. I had not realized how clever he was. He invented several gadgets that were on display.
Jefferson positioned his bed in an alcove between his bedroom and study so he could roll out of bed into either room, maximizing work time. And when he rolled out of bed in the morning, he immediately plunged his feet into a bucket of ice water.
The Great Clock, which he designed himself was powered by cannonball weights that also tracked the days of the week as they descended. It was so large it required a hole cut in the floor to accommodate the full week’s drop. Saturday could only be seen in the basement.
There were dumbwaiter wine shelves were built into the fireplace surround so wine bottles could be sent up from the cellar without servants needing to be present during dinner conversations. Some interpret this as Jefferson wanting privacy for political talk.
The Polygraph was a copying machine with linked arms that made a duplicate of letters as he wrote them. He was an obsessive correspondent and loved this device.
A revolving bookstand could hold five books open simultaneously.
He also designed Monticello itself through multiple iterations over decades — it was essentially a lifelong architectural experiment. He and his extended family found themselves living in a construction zone for 40 years.
That revolving bookstand was an early browser app.
I think your auto-spell kicked in, that’s a panto-graph, not a polygraph. (Tell me no lies)
That is indeed a pantograph but at Monticello is referred to as a polygraph.