Or could the bust be of William Macbride Childs ??

WMC

It could be a rotary spark transmitter, at the back of the assembly it looks like there is a coil and just in front of that are two balls that the spark jumps between. Just in front of that are what looks like two motors, I suspect one of them is a motor and the other one is a rotary spark generator.

I think the picture is older than what the date on the back of the card suggests, because by 1914, around the time of the Titanic, they were quite advanced by then and were using large rotary spark transmitters, the Titanic transmitter was 5KW which was massive for those days. If you look at the diagram part of the way down the page there is a schematic of the rotary spark transmitter used on the Titanic, you can see the motor/generator, spark gap and coil assembly.

As for the lab, it could be anywhere, maybe even Tesla, Edison or Marconi who would have been experimenting with these devices around that time.

Not forgetting Faraday himself.

The contraption might be a prototype of an electric printer or copier as there appears to be a stack of white paper at one end; the heavy looking cylindrical drums and pulley system appear to be balanced on short wooden plinths over what might be a conveyer-belt operated by the large crank-handle on the side of the machine.The paper sheets would come out at the other end.[The beaker of liquid is a bit of a mystery].