In this talk at Cooper Hewitt, world-renowned antiquarian horologist Brittany Nicole Cox will explore the diverse utilization of the machine in design through a selection of objects drawn from the collections of Smithsonian museums. Examples will range from a nineteenth-century singing bird box to the world’s first tuning fork watch. Cox will make metaphysical and material connections among fascinating time-keeping machines and engineered mechanisms that were designed to produce illusion, animation, decoration, destruction, and more.