Gaudy 200-year-old pistol hides a beautiful secret - CNET

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Parmigiani Fleurier is a noted high-end watchmaker. It also runs a restoration shop to bring old watches back to life. Not content with just timepieces, the company took on the unusual project of restoring a crazy-oate 200-year-old pistol. Parmigiani Fleurier describes this process as "setting [the pistol] free from the torments of time."

The pistol is nothing like we normally imagine such a gun to look. It's not a big hunk of silver iron. It's a delicate two-barreled device coated in jewels and gold. The watchmaker traces the gun's origin to around 1815 and to well-known automata maker Freres Rochat.

Automata are moving mechanical devices, often taking the shapes of humans or animals. You might remember the 2011 Martin Scorsese movie "Hugo" about a broken automaton in the form of a man that writes with a pen.

Before they were robots

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Rochat specialized in bird automata that flap their wings, move their heads and chirp, and this is the secret hidden inside the oate pistol restored by Parmigiani Fleurier. You pull the hammer and squeeze the trigger. Instead of releasing a bullet, it frees a tiny beautiful songbird painstakingly covered in colorful feathers. It tweets and sings before disappearing back into the barrel.