You are viewing:
Browse results
-
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.
-
Mobilising the Energy in Store: stored collections, enthusiast experts and the ecology of heritage
This article considers the role of enthusiast experts as key actors within the ecology of public heritage, helping to keep stored museum collections ‘alive’ through their unique research practices, which we argue are ultimately beneficial across the wider museum sector.
-
Moments of danger
This article takes an exhibition I co-curated for the Science Museum and National Science and Media Museum as the starting point for a reflection on the relationships between neoliberal politics, the histories of photography, and the social meanings of science and technology.
-
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
Acting as an introduction to articles in this issue on a museums theme, this paper discusses the long-term history of science museums and the conjuncture of the late twentieth century which precipitated innovations in various science museums described in the collection.
-
Museums theme – Science vs technology in a museum’s display: changes in the Vienna Museum of Technology with a focus on permanent and temporary exhibitions and new forms of science education
This article focuses on the development of the displays and the content of the Vienna Museum of Technology as a whole, and on new educational approaches in cooperation with schools in particular.
-
Rather unspectacular: design choices in National Health Service glasses
This article discusses the provision of spectacles under the NHS scheme in Britain from 1946-86. It reveals there was no explicit consideration of consumer choice or fashion and argues that this limited design across the British optical industry.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Review: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude
A review of the Ships, clocks and stars: the quest for longitude exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
-
Review: Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee (Royal College of Physicians, 18 January–29 July 2016)
Review of the exhibition Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee at the Royal College of Physicians