There is a web page devoted to one exhibit in Clarks Shoe Museum - the Eureka machine.

Read all about it here.

That takes me back. I was fairly new in Street, and visited the museum. Being a Latin teacher at the time, I took special note of the Roman shoe at the start of the museum, and consulted the archivist. What with one thing and another, we got quite friendly, and so when the TV people came to make a programme in the 'Day Out' series about Street and the countryside around, introduced by Angela Ripon, I got roped in to translate the line of Latin verse that the Eureka machine came up with.

In fact, the producer cheated, and filmed the line previously produced, and got me to translate it, and afterward set the machine whirring, cutting the previous result in after the whirring. So I was particularly privileged to witness the old and delicate machine at work. I don't think it has been set in motion since.

Do have a look at the page I linked to. John Clark, who made the machine, exhibited it in the Great Exhibition, I believe, and then elsewhere in London, charging people for each line they saw made. He got enough money from it to build himself a nice house, I'm told.

The mechanism is very complicated, but the actual composition of the verses is very simple. At the time of the TV programme I wrote a simple computer program for the BBC machine I borrowed from my school (remember the BBC computers, and BBC BASIC?), which could write all the millions of possible lines, using only about 20 lines of program.