*That's quite a touching tribute to the great engineer-tinkerer artist.
Adam Savage, a class act kinda guy
Question 26: Making for the Kitchen
Do I make anything to actually help me cook or in my home life? Yes, absolutely. I made the separators for the drawers in my kitchen that hold my pots. It's on my list to make a thing that catches the coffee grinds out of my coffee grinders. Perhaps my most important inspirational maker is the sculptor Alexander Calder.
Alexander Calder — who, it turns out, I just heard this last night, went to Lowell High School in San Francisco along with our Supreme Court justice, Breyer. Yeah, that would be bad to get that wrong. Alexander Calder is the inventor of the mobile. He made mobiles and non-movable mobiles, he called stabiles, which I think is hilarious, but he also got his start in Paris in the '20s with a thing called circus. Circus was a suitcase of little tiny circus performers and animals and sword swallowers and trapeze artists, all made out of like coat-hanger wire. He and his wife would take them to parties and they would perform circus. For all of my childhood, circus and the suitcase it was in was the front piece at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.
I saw it repeatedly and it really inspired me and then about 1988, The Frick in New York had a show of just the stuff Calder had built for his house. A toilet paper roller that was like a duck that walked when you pulled toilet paper. He built a toaster that burned one of his daughter's name in one side of the toast and the other daughter's name in the other side of the toast. I love that stuff. I built our doorbell. There is a great restaurant in London called Barbar Ricard. I don't know why it says bar twice but at every table at Barbar Ricard there is a brass button that says Press for Champagne, and when you press it, somebody shows up in your table in like 20 seconds with a bottle of champagne.
We had that on our house for the longest time, a brass button that said press for champagne….
