Edinburgh University Instrument Museum

Pete Woods and I recently visited Edinburgh University Instrument Museum.  They have an enormous collection, including some weird and wonderful timpani and percussion instruments, the like of which we had never seen before.  We are very grateful to the Curator, Dr Jenny Nex, for showing us around.  Both drums below were made by George Potter, we estimate at the end of the 1800s.  We suspect that their tuning mechanisms, although beautifully engineered and manufactured, actually weren’t that successful due to the difficulty of spreading the tension evenly all the way around the drum.  Hence these types of designs fell out of fashion quite quickly.