You are viewing:
Browse results
-
Review: The Return of Curiosity, by Nicholas Thomas
Review of The Return of Curiosity, by Nicholas Thomas
-
Science and the City: Introduction
This paper introduces the three articles in this issue relating to Science City 1550–1800: The Linbury Gallery, which opened at the Science Museum, London, in 2019. It discusses the rationale behind the gallery and its relationship to collections and research.
-
Why the anonymous and everyday objects are important: using the Science Museum’s collections to re-write the history of vision aids
Drawing upon experience of being a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) student at the Science Museum, this article reflects on the value of collections with limited cataloguing in historical research and offers ways to overcome the problems of interpretation.
-
The Hugh Davies Collection: live electronic music and self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments, 1967–1975
The author describes and contextualises the Hugh Davies Collection (HDC) – a collection of self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments and other electronic sound apparatus formerly owned by the English experimental musician, instrument inventor, and live electronic music pioneer Hugh Davies (1943–2005).
-
The life and material culture of Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923): suffragette, physicist, mathematician and inventor
Suffragette, physicist, mathematician, and inventor: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when few women had access to opportunities in STEM, Englishwoman Hertha Marks Ayrton held all these roles and advocated for social justice, including suffrage for women.
-
‘The whole exhibition becomes the stage…’ – a journey through time by children for children as a new approach to peer learning
This paper presents an account of a project that the Museum of Electricity and Life implemented to provide educationally disadvantaged children with opportunities to participate in cultural life and help them to develop new competences. The children accompanied their peer group as travel guides through the history of electricity. In the process they slipped into different roles and imparted their knowledge through short theatrical performances.
-
Threading through history: the vertical transmission of Davy, Faraday and Tyndall’s lecture demonstration practices
How can physical actions of performance be passed on through generations? This article highlights possible routes of transmission from lecture-demonstrations of nineteenth-century scientists at the Royal Institution to Science Museum Guide Lecturers in the 1950s, on to the performance practices of contemporary Explainers.
-
Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of the ‘sound object’
What if sounds were museum objects? Via an experimental curatorial practice, the author proposes a revised definition of the 20th century musical term ‘sound object,’ proposing it as the basis for a museological conception of sounds as heritage.
-
Understanding storm surges in the North Sea: Ishiguro’s electronic modelling machine
An introduction to one of the star objects in Mathematics: The Winton Gallery, an electronic storm surge modelling machine.
-
Ventriloquised voices: the Science Museum and the Hartree Differential Analyser
This paper proposes the analogy of ventriloquism as a way of extending the discussion about how objects speak and are used to tell different stories to audiences in museums as ‘material polyglots’. It explores how the Science Museum has changed the voices, stories, and physical and instrumental functions of a particular object – the ‘Trainbox’ version of the Douglas Hartree’s Differential Analyser – since it was collected in 1949.