Science Museum Research Articles

Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration

In their 1992 essay ‘The image of objectivity’, and again in Objectivity (2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe the development of ‘mechanical objectivity’. Nineteenth-century scientists, they argue, pursued ‘truth-to-nature’ by enlisting ‘self-registering instruments, cameras, wax molds, and a host of other devices […] with the aim of freeing images from human interference’. This emphasis on self-recording devices and the morals of machinery, important as it is, tends to focus our attention away from the often messy and convoluted means of image reproduction – by lithograph, hand-coloured engraving or photomechanical process, and often involving steps that seem sharply at odds with narratives of increasing standardization and scientific restraint. This essay draws on the Science Museum’s pictorial collections in order to look again at the construction of objectivity, this time from the point of view of making and reproducing images. Case studies are presented of the Luke Howard collection of cloud drawings and James Nasmyth’s lunar photographs, suggesting that scientists were more flexible in their approach to depictions of the truth than has previously been supposed, and that ‘manufactured’ may be a better term than ‘mechanical’ when we talk of objectivity in the nineteenth century. But this is also a reflexive story, about the collections of the Science Museum – an institution whose own history is, I argue in conclusion, particularly tied up with issues of accuracy, depiction and genre. These are brought together in the consideration of ‘atmosphere’ – a term as important for the historian of science as for the exhibition curator.

The Science Museum and the Leonardo da Vinci Quincentenary Exhibition of 1952

The Science Museum and the Leonardo da Vinci Quincentenary Exhibition of 1952

Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum

The Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security exhibition at various Science Museum Group sites from 2019 to 2022 explored the remarkable, little-known world of codebreaking, ciphers and secret communications from the trenches of the First World War to cyber security today. At the heart of the exhibition was the personal and technological story of codebreaking at Bletchley Park, the British centre for codebreaking and cryptanalysis during the Second World War, as well an acknowledgement of the vital pre-war contribution of the Polish Cipher Bureau.

Obituary: Brian Bracegirdle (1933?2015) at the Science Museum

Obituary: Brian Bracegirdle (1933?2015) at the Science Museum

Staging listening: new methods for engaging audiences with sound in museums

This article reports on the experimental methodology and key findings of the AHRC-funded impact and engagement project Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum (2020–21). The project undertook a series of listening-based public engagement activities – described here as staging listening – to identify new ways of engaging listening audiences with sound technology objects in museums. These activities led to the creation of three new interactive sounding exhibit prototypes created jointly with audiences. Because the project took place during periods of lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the UK in 2020–21, the exhibit prototypes were created digitally and tested via online interaction. The article argues that engaging with listening audiences can diversify and enrich museum listening scenarios, a term we use here to describe auditory situations which elicit different kinds of listening attention, interaction and learning. These listening scenarios produce divergent signatures of listening, a concept we develop here to describe the various kinds of learning and engagement we observed throughout the project.

Museums as brokers of participation: how visitors view the emerging role of European science centres and museums in policy

Museums as brokers of participation: how visitors view the emerging role of European science centres and museums in policy

Preserving skills and knowledge in heritage machinery operations

This article details an approach to knowledge capture on a collection of working textile machinery at the Science and Industry Museum. The machinery collection dates between 1880 and 1955 and the knowledge capture process outlined in the case study was prompted by the retirement announcement of the last machine operator on staff with first-hand experience of the textile industry.

Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph

Museums collect, preserve and interpret physical objects because they contain historical evidence that is sometimes difficult – if not impossible – to access through text and image-based research alone. In cases where original objects have been lost to history, reconstructions offer one way of reclaiming aspects of a past object’s design, use context and material culture. This article describes one such reconstruction project, which I recently undertook with collaborators at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. The goal of the project was to reconstruct Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake’s ear phonautograph: an 1874 curiosity that used an excised human middle ear to visually inscribe sound waves. Originally conceived of as a tool for deaf education, it became better known as the instrument that provided Bell with the technical insights he needed to develop and patent the telephone in 1876. This article consists of three parts. The first provides a historical background of the ear phonautograph and rationale for its reconstruction; the second offers a detailed description of the research and fabrication process; the third presents preliminary research findings that emerged through our experience building and operating the completed reconstruction.

The birth of a collection in Milan: from the Leonardo Exhibition of 1939 to the opening of the National Museum of Science and Technology in 1953

The birth of a collection in Milan: from the Leonardo Exhibition of 1939 to the opening of the National Museum of Science and Technology in 1953

Oramics to electronica: investigating lay understandings of the history of technology through a participatory project

Oramics to Electronica was a 2011 Science Museum project designed to put the tools of museum participation in the service of research into public history, taking the history of electronic music as our example. The primary output was a temporary exhibition. Whereas the term ‘public history’ is often used to denote popularisation of academic history, in this inflection we are primarily concerned with how lay people like our visitors think about the past in general, and about the past of science and technology in particular. Taking the opportunities that arose, we worked with two ‘expert’ groups - of original 1960s participants in electronic music and of 12 recruited present-day music enthusiasts. We also enrolled a group of theatre students and another of writers to respond to the themes of the project and, in particular, to the ‘Oramics Machine’ a unique sound synthesizer created by Daphne Oram. In this essay, an account of our practice is bookended with consideration of related practice and reflections on the implications of the project. It is suggested that the project demonstrated the virtues of proceeding by way of engagement with micro-audiences to understand the ‘cognitive exclusion’ of potential visitors who do not see their interests represented in museum displays.

Understanding storm surges in the North Sea: Ishiguro’s electronic modelling machine

In December the Science Museum will open Mathematics: The Winton Gallery. The new gallery tells mathematical stories in relation to a broad spectrum of fundamental human concerns. One of the key exhibits is a newly acquired machine for modelling storm surges in the North Sea. Designed by Japanese engineer Shizuo Ishiguro, the object offers a way to explore the far-reaching impact and relevance of mathematical work.

The potential and pitfalls of machine learning in the Congruence Engine context

This article considers the role of machine learning (ML) in the Congruence Engine project. The authors bring their digital and ML experience to the project and here reflect on existing tools and approaches, the particular challenges of Congruence Engine endeavour, and possible solutions within and beyond the project. Although these ideas will develop as the project progresses, the authors draw on knowledge of the existing ML landscape and current digital collections practice as well as learnings from Heritage Connector, the Science Museum Group’s previous project in the same funding scheme as Congruence Engine. The authors propose that while significant advances in ML and the availability of open datasets such as Wikidata offer huge opportunities for linking heritage collections, this will require a pipeline model with iterative stages of human intervention. Closer relationships will need to be developed between human curators, researchers and users of ML and the technology and processes it requires and this article points to the likely areas of collaboration that Congruence Engine will explore and test.

A history of amulets in ten objects

What are amulets? How are they situated in the larger narrative of European healing? Varied and complex objects, amulets present both challenges and opportunities for historians and museums alike. Yet an examination of these often-overlooked items within a medical context can provide significant information about cure and protection over different times and geographies. This article analyses ten amulets from the Science Museum collections, and asks what we can learn from exploring these objects’ material features and varying functions. It argues for a re-consideration of amulets from their categorisation by nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors and classification by modern museums, to their recognition as a significant part of the history of healing.

‘A Chamber of Noise Horrors’: sound, technology and the museum

This article examines the 1935 Science Museum temporary exhibition on Noise Abatement, situating it in the sound historical context of inter-war Britain, and making an argument that the ‘way of hearing’ it advanced was part of an attempt to shape auditory perception in the interests of a class-bound culture of acoustic civilization. Further, the article uses this exhibition to mount an argument that museum scholars should consider sound not simply as a medium of engagement, but also as a politically interested and socially active field.

Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century

Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century

Seismographs at Eskdalemuir Observatory, 1908–1925: tools for rethinking the origins of international cooperation in seismology

The British seismologist John Milne (1850–1913) is a dominant and celebrated figure in historical accounts of seismology. In this paper I use evidence from seismographs preserved in the collections of the Science Museum Group to reconsider his contribution, particularly to the progress of international collaboration in seismology. These instruments were installed at Eskdalemuir Observatory in Dumfriesshire, Scotland between 1908 and 1925; not only were they situated far from Milne’s private observatory on the Isle of Wight, but they represented examples of Russian, Japanese and German seismograph design as well as Milne’s own. No other site in Britain boasted such an international suite of earthquake instruments. Together, they reveal an alternative vantage-point from which to view his influence. By attending closely to the instruments’ provenance, I show how the collection can be a powerful tool for decentring the hagiography that surrounds the so-called ‘Father of Modern Seismology’.

Wired-up in white organdie: framing women's scientific labour at the Burden Neurological Institute.

The Burden Neurological Institute (BNI) is widely considered one of the central sites in the history of British neuroscience. Founded in 1939 to investigate the anatomy, functions, and disorders of the human brain, the BNI rapidly established a reputation as a world-leading centre of research and expertise. Due to the rich insights offered by the BNI Papers, held in the archives of the Science Museum, London, the work of the BNI has become a popular topic among historians of science and technology. However, one key omission in both the archival record and in subsequent historical accounts has been the BNI's prominent employment of women as researchers, technicians and laboratory assistants. To address this absence, this article examines the comparatively underutilised photographic collections of the BNI Papers, in which women feature more prominently. However, rather than providing an unproblematic 'window' onto the experiences of these scientific workers, this article contends that the photographs in question 'frame' women's labour in particular ways so as to devalue, obscure and erase their contributions to the BNI's much-lauded achievements. The article considers three such frames: the objectification of women as the subjects, rather than the practitioners, of neuroscientific research; the elision of women's scientific, domestic, and familial roles; and the visual equation of women's labour with that of the machine. The article concludes by considering some of the ways in which critiques of visual framing might be integrated into both future historical accounts and museum display practices.

The Whitworth: a place for Industry and Art

The Whitworth has been making art useful since 1889. Originally founded in the memory of the pioneering engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803–87), the gallery was built for ‘the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester’. As the Whitworth celebrated its 130th year, the gallery hosted a major exhibition which explicitly explores and acknowledges the history of the Whitworth institute, gallery and park. A proponent of standardisation, Sir Joseph revolutionised precision engineering through his development of interchangeable parts in machinery. While he maintained a natural interest in technical education throughout his life, less is known about whether this support extended to the fine and decorative arts. Conversely, today the Whitworth is celebrated for its internationally significant collections of art and design and its contemporary exhibitions programme, but for many visitors the gallery’s association with the great Victorian mechanical engineer is less clear. This paper, which was presented at the Science Museum Group Research Conference 2019: The Place of Industry, reflects on research that was first carried out in preparation for the exhibition ‘Standardisation and Deviation: the Whitworth Story’ (14 December 2019–January 2022). It is not intended to be an original piece of research nor to provide a comprehensive history of the gallery. What follows is a reflection on some of the original source material and research papers that were consulted in preparation for curating the exhibition. Together they have been used to illustrate how the history of the Whitworth provides an object lesson in how art and technology unite.

A sustainable storage solution for the Science Museum Group

A sustainable storage solution for the Science Museum Group

Talk of the Town mobile app platform: New method for engaging family in STEM learning and research in homes and communities.

Children do not just learn in the classroom. They engage in "informal learning" every day just by spending time with their family and peers. However, while researchers know this occurs, less is known about the science of this learning-how this learning works. This is so because investigators lack access to those moments of informal learning. In this mini-review we present a technical solution: a mobile-based research platform called "Talk of the Town" that will provide a window into children's informal learning. The tool will be open to all researchers and educators and is flexibly adaptable to these needs. It allows access to data that have never been studied before, providing a means for developing and testing vast educational interventions, and providing access to much more diverse samples than are typically studied in laboratories, homes, and science museums. The review details the promise and challenges associated with these new methods of data collection and family engagement in STEM learning sciences.