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Courtesy of my parents who are at the Henry Ford Museum (formerly Greenfield Village) in Dearborn, Michigan today - a photo of the watchmaker's bench setup in Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. This is a pretty good display, a pallet warmer, truing caliper, staking set (unfortunately closed box), spirit lamp, and check out that six jaw chuck on the lathe.

The museum is a mostly an outdoor village where Ford had moved numerous buildings important to himself and to the history of technology in the USA. (Also includes the Wright brothers' bicycle shop for example). As a teenager I worked in an 1850's tavern there.

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There are several other large lathes too.

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Posted

Update on this...

The big lathes pictured were from Edison's machine shop. But the watchmaker's lathe and desk was not. My family just told me they found that in a preserved jewelry store near the Edison shop. They were there again and spoke to a docent this time, who told them that was Henry Ford's personal watchmaking bench setup and all Ford's personal tools on the desk.

And not only that... As late as the 1940s before Ford died, he actually came in and worked on that bench at that lathe regularly while museum visitors were around because the museum and his collected buildings has opened in the 1930s.

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