London’s Smaller Technology Collections: A Sampler

Abstract

LONDON’S SMALLER TECHNOLOGY COLLECTIONS: A SAMPLER JOHN ROBINSON Faced with the rich hyperbole frequently invoked by menu writers in European restaurants, visitors will do well to look for guidance to what the locals are eating at adjacent tables. In London you will be fortunate if this includes steak-and-kidney pie. Properly prepared, this traditional English dish combines cubes of raw beefsteak with a few portions of kidney, diced small to release as much as possible of their flavor and baked slowly under a pastry crust. Each ingredient contributes separately and distinctively to the richness of the whole. Such a dish will fortify you to look at some of the two-hundred-odd museums in Greater London. Like the steak in your pie, the larger institutions will bring a familiar taste to your palate. Their displays reflect London’s many roles as a center of government, an imperial capital, and the hub of the nation’s transport system. They also pro­ vide a showcase for the broad range of cultural, anthropological, and zoological material brought back to London as the fruits of imperial expansion. The complex of national institutions at South Kensington will need no more introduction to visitors than do the British Museum in Bloomsbury, the London Transport Museum recently redisplayed in part of what was Covent Garden’s flower market, or the National Maritime Museum, established in a former royal palace at Greenwich in 1934. The Museum of London, adjacent to the Barbican arts and residen­ tial complex in the City of London, and the Imperial War Museum in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital in Lambeth, similarly exhibit much of technological interest among their displays devoted to wider topics. All these institutions welcome many hundreds of thousands of visitors from overseas each year and are justly popular for the variety of their displays and the excellence of their publications, some Mr. Robinson took early retirement in 1994 after twenty-four years as a technology curator at various museums, including the Science Museum. He now specializes in maritime history and chairs the Technical Committee of the National Historic Ships Committee.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/96/3701-0008$01.00 151 152 John Robinson of which are published in the principal European languages and in Japanese. With such a breadth of choice, it would be easy to overlook those smaller institutions whose distinctive and unfamiliar flavor add a kid­ neylike piquancy to the museum pie that London offers its visitors. Several rely on volunteers to welcome visitors, and their limited open­ ing hours mean that visits have to be carefully planned. One such is the Musical Museum, founded in 1963 in a disused church in Brent­ ford by Frank Holland to preserve and demonstrate an exceptional collection of unusual automata. Guided tours take place each week­ end, when visitors are shown how digitally controlled music repro­ duction had its orgins decades before the compact disc. Conservation of this remarkable collection occupies most of the intervening week­ days, with occasional evening concerts at which rare music rolls are played. Within a few hundred meters of the Musical Museum is the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, housed in a former Metropolitan Water Board pumping station. Since 1973 a small but loyal team of volun­ teers has restored a collection of beam pumping engines, the largest such collection to survive anywhere, and imported other engines from elsewhere to complete their coverage. With the engineering expertise thus built up over twenty-five years, the Kew Bridge En­ gines Trust now tackles dismantling, removal, and restoration proj­ ects for other preservation agencies. The largest of the steam engines working at Kew Bridge, and the largest working anywhere in the world, is a 90-inch Cornish engine (fig. 1). When it was designed, engineers had only an imperfect un­ derstanding of the strength of their materials. The collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879, with the loss of seventy-five lives, horrified engi­ neers into testing the strengths of their materials rigorously. A shrewd Scot named David Kirkaldy (1820—97) perceived an opening for a testing facility independent of contractors and their clients alike. Close to...