MOTnews 4 (30/06/2000)

• New acquisition for the Museum

Recently the Museum was able to lay it's hands on an entire laboratory for dentures and a dentist's practice.

It's the equipment of an Antwerp dentist, named Bernard Noël, who was know as one of the most modern dental technicians in the thirties.

He gave up his practice in 1956, but all the equipment in his workshop remained untouched. It is very rare to find such a collection - almost preserved in a time warp - and the Museum rapidly made the decision to purchase it.

A topic such as this offers us the opportunity to explain to the audience in a very vivid manner how technology can be found everywhere.

• Still puzzled about the "what's it" on our website (www.mot.be)? Now you can

see these unidentified objects in the flesh when you pass by the Museum.

We have installed a "what's it"-display window at the front door of the division Guldendal (address: Museum voor de Oudere Technieken, Guldendal 20, 1850 Grimbergen, Belgium).

TRUE OR FALSE

• More than 2.500 years ago people already made "false teeth".

You can find the answer in our next MOT-NEWS.

KIDS-NEWS : something to tell your children tonight

• "toothknowledge"
• The earliest-known set of dentures with both upper and lower rows of false

teeth, was dug up in Switzerland and is believed to be some 500 years old. The teeth were carved out of bone and were held together with a hinges system. Such dentures could only have served aesthetic purposes, because it wasn't possible to eat with them.

• Until about a 100 years ago dentures were made out of animal bones,

preferably hippo-bones since they were so strong. On the downside was the fact that these bone teeth turned brown and rotten rapidly. A solution for this was the successful use of porcelain for dental work.

• In the past no effective anaesthetic to soothe the pain when they pulled

your teeth existed. In order to anaesthetize his patients an American dentist experimented with laughing gas about 150 years ago. The effect of laughing gas had already been discovered, but it was mainly used for amusement at society parties