Stories from the stores

One year, two hundred stories

2010-07-30T15:18:06Z

Stories From The Stores is one year old today. Woo hoo!

Over the past twelve months, we’ve told 200 stories about science, technology, engineering and medicine as captured in our remarkable collections of objects, pictures, books and archives.

Our history – your history and mine – is embedded in the objects we’ve invented, made and used. Time flies, and we might forget this history if we didn’t collect stuff. Here, for instance, is a state-of-the-art aircraft flight exactly a century ago:

'Mr Gibbs Making an Evening Flight', July 1910 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Wonderful image – and worth remembering if you’re jetting off for a foreign holiday this summer. We’ve come a long way in a short time.

Here’s to the coming year – lots more stories from the Science Museum stores!

Remember that you must die…

2010-07-28T10:23:33Z

Its a worrying title for a blog, but ‘remember that you must die’ or ‘memento mori’ in Latin, was a common saying that our historical counterparts took to heart. Popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries, memento moris can can be anything from pocket watches, pendants, rings, ribbon slides, even statues and walking sticks. Some carried a lock of hair from a departed loved one, woven into a scene. Most show skeletons, skulls or coffins and – not for the faint-hearted - decaying corpses.

Memento mori, England, 1810-1850 (A78828, Science Museum, London)

Most of these items are in our store, but they recently got a rare outing, many of them for the first time. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York held an exhibition Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Culture bringing together their own fabulous collection of Himalayan art with Western material culture.

My favourite object that went on loan was this:

Pocket watch, 1700-1930 (A103905, Science Museum, London)

A watch could not be a more perfect reminder of the shortness of life. On the watch face is a small inscription meaning ‘time flies’ to hammer the message home. The thing that makes this object even more remarkable is it that it was once owned by Queen Mary, wife of British monarch George V. She presented it to Henry Wellcome at Buckingham Palace in 1931 to add to his enormous collection.

Much to my colleagues’ envy, I’ve been asked to courier the loan back to Britain. Loans take a lot of organising, the lions’ share by our Collections Registry and Conservation teams. But couriering is not glamorous - there’s a lot of waiting around in cargo sheds at 5am and once you’ve seen one aircraft hanger, you’ve seen them all. I must admit I will be keeping to myself that I’m travelling with memento moris so not to scare the more nervous flyers….

Last chance to see: Thomas Harriot

2010-07-28T10:25:53Z

Monday marked 401 years since Thomas Harriot made the first recorded astronomical observation with a telescope - so one year since we opened our Cosmos & Culture exhibition celebrating Harriot and other astronomers.

For the last year, we’ve been lucky enough to have some of Harriot’s drawings on display, but for their long-term preservation it’s time to remove them from the light. This weekend is your last chance to see the centuries-old originals before we return them to their owner’s care and replace them with facsimiles.

Harriot’s first drawing of our Moon pre-dates any other telescopic observations. But Galileo beat him to it in discovering moons around Jupiter. Harriot probably read Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius around July, but by then Jupiter was too near the Sun for him to check it out. This drawing shows his first observations of the moons in autumn 1610. The first night wasn’t too successful – he noted, ‘I saw but one, and that above’ – but over the next year he made 98 further observations and tracked all four Galilean satellites.

Harriot tracks the Galilean satellites (Lord Egremont/West Sussex Record Office, used with permission)

By winter Harriot had turned his telescope on the Sun, risking blindness by viewing it directly with only mist to shield its fierce glare. In December 1610 he saw sunspots – one of several astronomers to independently discover them around the same time.

Harriot notes 'three blacke spots' on the Sun (Lord Egremont / West Sussex Record Office, used with permisson).

So with all these achievements, why isn’t Harriot as famous as Galileo? Well, unlike his Italian counterpart he already had rich patrons, so didn’t need to publish his work to attract sponsors. He may have also preferred to keep a low profile after a brief stint in prison as a Gunpowder Plot suspect. After his death, his astronomical papers lay undiscovered for over 150 years, so not many people have seen them in the last four centuries. If you’re in London this week, take a good look while you still can.

Space Debris

2010-07-28T09:57:35Z

X3/Prospero thermal surfaces experiment (Doug Millard, 2005)

This box contains a flight spare set of experimental surfaces for the Prospero satellite that was launched in 1971. They were designed to tell scientists more about how different satellite materials and finishes – matt, shiny etc, would behave in the temperature extremes of space.

It has always reminded me of a much larger experiment flown by NASA (LDEF - which stands for Long Duration Exposure Facility) that was covered with all sorts of equivalent surfaces.

LDEF satellite during its six year stay in orbit (NASA)

The LDEF was brought back to Earth in the Shuttle and scientists discovered that its surfaces were covered with impact craters from micro-meteoroids.

Micro-meteoroid impact crater on the LDEF satellite (NASA)

That was back in the 1980s but if the mission were to be repeated now it would almost certainly suffer many more collisions from the bits of space debris that we have put up there. There are thousands upon thousands of pieces of rocket and spacecraft circling Earth and it is becoming a big problem for satellite operators.

Computer representation of just some of the debris pieces orbiting Earth (NASA)

At a meeting last week Air Commodore Stuart Evans RAF, Head of Joint Doctrine, Air and Space, DCDC, pointed out that ‘all nine sectors of the UK’s critical national infrastructure (communications, emergency services, government and public services, finance, energy, food, health, transport and water) all rely, to a greater or lesser degree, on space.

What to do about the debris problem, then? There is no simple answer at the moment and all the space players can do is ensure as little new debris is created as possible.

Prospero is still in orbit and next October scientists hope to re-contact it for its 40^th anniversary. They won’t be able to examine those experimental surfaces but if they could I wonder what state they would be in now!

Busy bees

2010-07-22T10:26:38Z

Recently, searching the physics collections on our object database, I was intrigued by an entry for a ‘radiation detector built to detect bees marked with radium’. Some research from our wonderful volunteer Eduard revealed more.

A discharge (gas) tube from Gilbert Tomes's bee detector (Science Museum).

The device was designed by Gilbert Tomes in the early 1940s. Tomes, a keen amateur apiarist, was seeking a way to track swarms by detecting when the queen bee left the hive. He tried tagging the queen with a tiny magnet to trigger a circuit as she left – but as you might imagine, attaching magnets to bees was a tricky job.

Dabbing them with luminous paint proved somewhat easier, but Tomes’s photocell detector setup was triggered by other light sources as well as the painted bees. Then he remembered that the luminous paint contained radium (despite increasing awareness of its dangers from the early 20th century, radium paint was widely used in WW2-era instruments).

As part of their work for the Baird Television company, Tomes and his colleague Alec Tidmarsh had been investigating Geiger-Muller tubes, which at the time were little used outside scientific circles. They made a simple device to detect the radioactive bees, which they showed to London Zoo’s head beekeeper. Impressed, he sent a story to the Press Association, and suddenly the ‘Tomes Queen Detector’ was big news.

Tomes and Tidmarsh were deluged with requests for their Geiger counters and a few years later founded 20th Century Electronics (now Centronic), which became a global leader in detector technology.

Woodcut of bees in a herbal encyclopedia, 1497 (Science Museum).

Perhaps the company’s success improved Tomes’s wife’s opinion of his bee research. In his diaries on 19 September 1941, Gilbert noted: ‘Feeding bees with sugar syrup. This was rather a sticky business and Mary did not like her kitchen being taken over. She wanted to know why we had to feed the bees when they were supposed to be feeding us with honey’.

Birds’ Eye Views

2010-07-22T14:43:47Z

I wonder if the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) had a little-known sub-section devoted to pigeon fanciers. A branch, perhaps (or a wing)? How else to explain the preponderance of interesting features high up on old buildings that are indistinct at street level but – presumably – clear as bread crumbs to passing pigeons?

I was mulling this over yesterday as I squinted at the figures and details of The Treasury’s Whitehall pediment, and then again while attempting to make out the features on one of Imperial College’s older buildings, just around the corner from the Science Museum.

Relief of the globe on the old Chemistry building of Imperial College (Doug Millard, 2010)

Albertopolis, as this corner of South Kensington has often been referred to, is awash with such elevated and hard-to-make-out architectural treats. Yesterday I was struggling to read the inscriptions on the other Albert Memorial, the one round the back of the Albert Hall and at the top of the steps (where Michael Caine fought Oliver MacGreevey in ‘The Ipcress File’).

Memorial to Albert and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Doug Millard, 2010)

It’s a hugely important monument, commemorating as it does the Great Exhibition of 1851 – the proceeds of which paid for many of the buildings of Albertopolis (the educational institutions, the museums and, of course, the Hall) – and the man behind it, Albert Francis Augustus Charles Emanuel, The Prince Consort.

This loom can be seen in the Science Museum's 'Making the Modern World' gallery but was first displayed in the 'Machinery in Motion' part of the Great Exhibition in 1851 (Science Museum/Science&Society)

But the exhibition itself was in Hyde Park and save passing references to its location on the maps at the Park entrances there is no monument at or near to where Paxton’s gigantic ‘Crystal Palace’ once stood.

Site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park (Doug Millard, 2010)

I wonder if, with the recent dry weather revealing ancient disturbances of the ground, it is the pigeons that once again are best placed to appreciate, I would argue, the under-recognised site of one of London’s most significant cultural events.

Catching the Sun

2010-07-15T10:42:19Z

So, did any of you make it to Easter Island to see last weekend’s total solar eclipse? The path of totality crossed very few landmasses, so observing this eclipse was for the most intrepid travellers. Next weekend marks the 150th anniversary of a solar eclipse which was somewhat less remote – but observed by some very intrepid travellers, who for the first time used photography to settle a scientific debate.

On 18 July 1860, Warren De la Rue and his team eagerly awaited the eclipse in their makeshift wooden observatory at Rivabellosa in northern Spain. The observatory and its contents – some two tons of apparatus – had been transported from Plymouth to Bilbao on board HMS Himalaya and then by stagecoach to Rivabellosa, where De la Rue persuaded a local farmer to set aside his threshing floor for the observatory.

De la Rue's eclipse observatory as shown in the Illustrated London News, 1860 (Science Museum).

The key piece of apparatus was the Kew Photoheliograph, designed by De la Rue a few years before. The first instrument specifically designed to photograph celestial objects, it was regularly used at Kew Observatory to record images of the Sun and Moon. The astronomers hoped that its wet collodion plates, with their short exposure times, could record the prominences visible during a solar eclipse. At the time it was not known whether these were part of the Sun, or an effect of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Kew Photoheliograph is on display in Cosmos & Culture (Science Museum).

Working in the hot Spanish summer, the astronomers only had a few minutes to develop each plate before the wet collodion dried. But they successfully recorded prominences on several plates – De la Rue described them with names including Cauliflower and Boomerang. When the photographs were compared with ones taken by Fr Angelo Secchi 500km away at Desierto de las Palmas, the two sets were so similar that they proved prominences are intrinsic to the Sun.

An expedition photograph of the eclipse before totality (Science Museum).

For a lively account of the Rivabellosa expedition – including the tale of how the observatory almost burned down just minutes before the eclipse(!) - check out Stuart Clark’s The Sun Kings.

Taxi driver

2010-07-15T10:29:16Z

I was working at our large-object store at Wroughton the other day, looking at some of the vehicles in our transport collection. One of them is a really lovely Renault taxi from 1910:

Renault taxi, 1910 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Ain’t it just a peach? Anyway, on the train back from Wroughton I was reading a 1930s book by Herbert Hodge, called It’s Draughty In Front: the Autobiography of a London Taxidriver. I was amazed to find that in 1915, aged fifteen, Hodge got a job in a taxi garage that ran Renaults just like the one I’d just seen.

In the book, he provides a terrific first-hand description of the cars and what they were like to run.

“When the drivers arrived I was expected to start their engines for them – a heart-bursting job in those days, especially with war-time petrol… I soon acquired the knack, learning to ‘dope’ the cylinders with petrol, and heat the plugs on the gas-ring, and all the other dodges necessary for those ancient engines.”

He went on:

“The most difficult knack to learn was the sharp pull to start the Renaults. The first time I got it, I gave such an almighty jerk, I brought the open bonnet down on my head. But I started the engine.”

I love finding these first-hand accounts of what new technology was really like, especially relating to stuff we’ve got in our collections. I feel genuinely closer to our Renault taxi having read Hodge’s words, and next time I visit Wroughton, I’ll be all over that car, imagining Hodge struggling to start the engine back in 1915.

Hodge was a very interesting character in other ways. More on that another time…

FM: No Static At All

2010-07-12T17:34:01Z

Our car is still fitted with a cassette player. Albums from long ago (Steely Dan and Beatles are current favourites) provide regular entertainment on journeys and are also enjoyed by the younger members of the family. I suppose we should have moved over to a CD player or something more exotic still, but somehow it seems unnecessary while the cassettes hold out (now 25 years old plus and still working fine!)

8-Track tapes like this one dominated the American in-car market between the 1960s and 1980s but were then killed off by the improved audio quality of the handy cassette. (Science Museum/Science & Society)

I suppose the same can now be said of the car’s FM radio, given government Culture Minister Ed Vaizey’s announcement last week that the digital radio switch-over will happen, but only when a vast majority of listeners have voluntarily adopted digital radio over analogue.

He went on to highlight in-car radio as one of the biggest challenges facing the digital switch-over. This because of the difficulty in receiving digital signals while moving at speed. Once again, why bother to spend money on new technology when the old still works just fine. He threw down the gauntlet to the car manufacturers to work towards some solutions.

But, although we choose perhaps to forget it, this tendency to delay novelty in favour of that which already works is by no means uncommon.

Smoothwell electric iron, 1935 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

Take another domestic technology – the electric iron: it’s changed little over at least 70 years. Neither, by and large, has the basic form of the bicycle, now well into its second century of pedalling.

: Rover ‘Safety’ Bicycle, 1885 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

And at the other end of the cost spectrum – we still use rockets adapted from 1950s inter continental ballistic missiles to launch satellites and probes into space – they exist, we know lots about them, they do the job – why fix things that aren’t bust?

A Delta 2 Rocket launches the Kepler space observatory in 2009 (NASA/Regina Mitchell-Ryall, Tom Farrar)

So novelty is no guarantee of successful innovation. Maybe Steely Dan had something to say about it in one of the songs we were listening to in the car: ‘FM – No Static at All.’

No Laughing Matter

2010-07-12T12:22:41Z

Gilray's 'A Scientific Lecture', 1802, depicts Humphry Davy 'bellowing' laughing gas

What have Humphry Davy, Mike Melvill and my dentist got in common? Answer: They’ve all exploited the chemistry of nitrous oxide, popularly known as ‘laughing gas’.

Davy experimented with euphoria-inducing properties of the gas with his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Watt. Davy was working at the Pneumatic Institution, set up by Thomas Beddoes to investigate the medical properties of inhaled or ‘factitous airs’. Davy pursued his experiments – part scientific, part recreational – with his normal con brio and was fortunate not to have seriously damaged his and others’ health.

Lucy Baldwin's Analgesic Apparatus, 1955-80, mixed oxygen and nitrous oxide during midwifery (Science Museum/Science & Society)

My dentist, alongside doctors and medics, has long employed nitrous oxide as an analgesic, to relax patients and as a prelude to anaesthesia.

And Mike Melvill? Well, as pilot of SpaceShipOne, the world’s first privately developed spacecraft, he depended on its ability to oxidise rocket fuel for the thrust that carried him spaceward on his pioneering sub-orbital flight of 2004.

Dobson Ozone spectrometer, 1926. Dobson's technique for detecting ozone led to the discovery of the ozone hole over Antartica in 1985. (Science Museum/Science & Society)

So nitrous oxide has a variety of uses but it also has a dark side. Whether produced naturally or by industrial activity it leads to ozone depletion of the upper atmosphere. This lets in more of the Sun’s harmful ultra-violet radiation which the ozone molecules normally absorb. Plus, nitrous oxide acts as a particularly effective greenhouse gas, trapping the heat re-radiated from the Earth’s surface and causing global temperature rises.

No laughing matter indeed.