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Festschrift: of mice and myths: challenges and opportunities of capturing contemporary science in museums
This essay considers some challenges of collecting contemporary artefacts, and questions whether such artefacts actually offer any greater challenges for museum storytelling than those from earlier periods. The article also discusses some opportunities of contemporary collecting, many of which have yet to be fully harnessed by science and technology museums.
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Technologies of Romance: Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk ♂ to a Telegraph Clerk ♀: the material culture and standards of early electrical telegraphy
This paper explores the material culture, electrical standards, and romance of early cable telegraphy as described in renowned physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s slightly tongue-in-cheek 1860 poem 'Valentine from A Telegraph Clerk ♂ to a Telegraph Clerk ♀'.
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Festschrift: how do we value artefacts in museum research?
How have museums of science and technology responded to the growing academic interest in their collections, and how have museum professionals contributed to the formation of new research agendas both inside and outside the walls of their respective institutions?
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Editorial
Editorial for special issue: 'Curating Medicine'
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A model instrument: the making and the unmaking of a model of the Airy Transit Circle
The article investigates the construction, reception and fate of a set of models of the Airy Transit Circle (the instrument that defined the Greenwich Prime Meridian) at the Exposition Universelle in 1855 and at the South Kensington Museum.
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‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965
The Mercury capsule Freedom 7 was displayed at the Science Museum in 1965–66. This was well documented through photographs in addition to textual documents. This paper proposes an analysis of the exhibition in the light of these records.
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‘As snug as a bug in a rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires
This article examines the image of the open coal fire in redefining the home in post-war Britain. Rather than a timeless source of reverie and comfort, the post-war fire articulated values that were central to the nation in this period of reconstruction.
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Reading, writing, drawing and making in the 18th-century instrument trade
In 1761–62, King George III commissioned a group of philosophical instruments from the London instrument-maker George Adams. This article traces Adams’s techniques of borrowing and adapting printed instrument designs, as he produced this spectacular collection.
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Responding to stories: The 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus and the Science Museum
This article reappraises the role of a now almost-forgotten exhibition of 1876 in building a vision for the permanent Science Museum, which was established nine years later. It argues that the exhibition promoted two apparently contrasting narratives about science used by founders, funders and lobbyists and circulating in the wider public sphere.
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Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
This essay draws on the Science Museum’s pictorial collections, in particular the excellent holdings of astronomical and meteorological images, in order to look again at the construction of objectivity, this time from the point of view of making and reproducing images.