Science Museum Group Journal Issue 20

This is an open issue that is especially strong in demonstrating the power of museum collections in research – the ‘material turn’ about which so much has been written. A case in point is the mini-collection Revealing Observatory Networks Through Object Stories in which Rebekah Higgitt approaches the study of observatories across the world by gathering nine ‘object biographies’ into three thematic papers in each of which three authors discuss objects illustrating the main theme. Archival objects are also studied here: Lucy Slater delves into the National Railway Museum’s civil defence archive to explore the railway’s response to nuclear threat, and Max Long analyses two data notebooks (A and B) in which pioneer natural history film-maker F Percy Smith recorded his craft. Graeme Gooday et al revisit the ‘Special Loan Collection’ of 1876, suggesting that it should be seen as an exercise in crowd-sourcing loans (mostly returned) rather than the basis of the permanent collections of the Science Museum. And Jo Gane adds a practice-based dimension to her research on the impact of experiments by a group of nineteenth-century Birmingham-based chemists on new photographic silver-plating techniques by reconstructing those techniques herself. The issue also includes obituaries of key contributors to science museum research and practice – Trevor Pinch and John Ward – and three book reviews.

Collection Details

Language

English

Keywords

natural history

research

material culture

Now showing 1 - 10 of 15

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How Britain’s railways prepared for nuclear war
(2023-10-18)
Slater, Lucy
As a nationalised industry during the Cold War, Britain’s railways were required to undertake civil defence work to prepare for a future conflict. Civil engineers that engaged with civil defence work were required to understand the destructive capacity of first atomic and later hydrogen weapons as well as the threats of nuclear fallout and radiation so that they could design and build structures capable of withstanding them. At first, these civil engineers objected as the work was beyond their expertise. But from 1952 onwards, each region of Britain’s railways, led by their civil engineering departments, began to build infrastructure and train their staff to prepare for the continued functioning of the railways following a nuclear attack. The central focus of railway civil defence changed as the bomb threat itself evolved, but its central purpose was always more focused on repair work and the assistance of military operations over civilian evacuations. However, shackled to guidance and limited available funding from the UK’s Ministry of Transport and the Home Office, planning was frequently delayed or scaled back. By the mid-1960s, alongside most other British civil defence programmes, the planning was abandoned and government funding withdrawn. But despite the myriad of setbacks and funding disappointments, those that undertook the railways’ civil defence planning and training during the early Cold War saw the value in their work and hoped to contribute to a national effort to survive and rebuild should the worst ever occur.
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Photography and electroplate in 1840s Birmingham
(2023-10-18)
Gane, Jo
Industrial improvements to silver plating through the work of electroplating firms such as Elkington, Mason and Co are an important part of our industrial heritage, bridging art, science and industry to form a significant portion of museum collections. However, the impact of this development of silverplating technology upon photography has not previously been explored. This article details the improvements that electroplated silver brought to the daguerreotype photographic process and to the manufacture of daguerreotype plates in Birmingham, offering a material reappraisal of the inventive qualities of the daguerreotype within a wider narrative of industrial manufacture. Chemists in 1840s Birmingham were developing photographic techniques and silverplating processes at the Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, later Queens College on Paradise Street. These scientists – George Shaw (1818–1904) and John Percy (1817–1889) – had detailed, tactile knowledge of the convergent chemistry and processes in both arenas. Developments in the industrial manufacture of silverplate in 1840s Birmingham created significant improvements to the materials used in the daguerreotype photographic process, making photography more viable as a commercial venture. Shaw planned an early portrait studio and worked with early innovators in electroplating techniques the Marrian brothers (Francis (1802–1893) and Benjamin James Pratt Marrian (1811–1891)) using magneto-plate technology developed by another Birmingham industrial entrepreneur John Woolrich (c. 1791–1843). This potential studio did not emerge due to restrictive patenting and licensing restrictions around the practice of daguerreotype photography, yet extant daguerreotypes tell a story of improvements stemming from technical innovation. These daguerreotypes situate industrial Birmingham as a place of innovation and invention and place the daguerreotype photographic process within narratives of industrial improvements and radically inventive manufacturing practices. Key to the analysis presented here is the role of the recreation of historic techniques in historical research and the value of acquiring tactile knowledge of the behaviour of materials during the processes explored. Here practical experiments allowed the author to look beyond the surviving daguerreotypes via material knowledge to the circumstances and social environment of production. This approach revealed new knowledge which offers an alternative reading of the history of objects through their materials.
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Book review: Science Illustration: A History of Visual Knowledge from the 15th Century to Today, by Anna Escardà³
(2023-10-18)
Bowyer, Surya
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Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Observatory audiences
(2023-10-18)
Higgitt, Rebekah
;
Biro, Susana
;
Raposo, Pedro
Like the contributions to the other papers in this collection (‘Object itineraries’ and ‘Instrumental networks’), those in this final section explore instrumental networks and object itineraries in order to tell new histories of observatory sites and their associated networks. (For a discussion of the genesis and thinking behind the collection of papers see the ‘Introduction’). Here, however, they focus on object stories that highlight the opportunities for and importance of communicating with those outside the scientific community. They show, however, a wide range of potential and actual audiences to be mediated between, from closely associated scientific institutions and those holding the purse strings within government, to groups making up the local civic society and a wider and more diffuse audience for scientific outputs and achievements. The objects explored here are an 1850s model of electrically triggered time signals, associated with those at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh; a late nineteenth-century astrographic telescope that, with approval of scientific and governmental audiences, brought the National Astronomical Observatory of Mexico into an international project and subsequently found new audiences through public display and artistic intervention; and a photoelectric relay that advertised the Yerkes Observatory to the Chicago and visiting public by forming part of a stunt, whereby the light of a distant star triggered the lighting of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.
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1876 and All That: the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ as a case study in crowd-sourced international public science
(2023-10-18)
Gooday, Graeme
;
King, Alexander
;
Spurna, Nela
Some historians of the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ exhibited in 1876 interpret its principal significance as catalysing the eventual transformation of science collections in the (South) Kensington Museum into London’s present-day Science Museum. Debates about that nexus have not, however, noted that this exhibition was an international crowd-sourced venture in public science. Far from being collection-founding donations, most artefacts displayed were discretionary loans contributed by private citizens, learned societies, instrument makers, universities, engineering companies and state departments from across both the UK and Europe, with most displayed items later returned to their exhibitors. Our paper draws upon the art historiography literature of ‘loan exhibitions’ to consider the 1876 exhibit in (mostly) physical science as part of a growing democratic tradition of resource sharing. This exhibitor-focused approach is illustrated via case studies of two kinds of contributors that did not predominantly have their loans converted to donations: (male) instrument makers and women, especially widows. In that context, we can interpret apparatus lending in 1876 as forms of advertising, memorialising, and just occasionally offloading disused but historically important equipment. It is in such terms that we can better understand why only a small fraction of loaned 1876 apparatus become permanent parts of the South Kensington science collections via such means as state departments discarding obsolete technical equipment.
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Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Introduction
(2023-10-18)
Higgitt, Rebekah
This paper introduces a group of three articles that bring together object stories relating to observatory history and networks. The three articles (‘Instrumental networks’, ‘Object itineraries’ and ‘Observatory audiences’) each bring together three object stories by different authors that contribute to the article theme. Here the genesis of the collection at the workshops of the Observatory Sites and Networks project is discussed, along with the approaches taken and the kind of insights that studies of material culture can shed on histories of observatories and the observatory sciences. The arrangement of the stories into three themes is outlined while common threads and recurring motifs that create connections and synergies across the thematic sections are highlighted. Together the collected papers make an argument for the use of objects in research, demonstrating the fruitfulness of investigating their histories and showing how they can expand our understanding of the networks of people, organisations and objects that were interested in or essential to the successful functioning of observatories. They also demonstrate the breadth and variety of interests and resources that were drawn into these networks, offering new ways of understanding and interpreting both observatory sites and museum objects.
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Tinkering with nature: craft, domesticity and female labour in F Percy Smith’s ‘Data’ notebooks (1925–1944)
(2023-10-18)
Long, Max
This article examines two notebooks belonging to the scientific filmmaker F Percy Smith, labelled ‘Data A’ and ‘Data B’, which are held at the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford. These notebooks offer valuable insights into Smith’s working process in the last two decades of his life – between 1925 and 1945 – and they detail the wide array of materials, tools and equipment that he used to produce his films. The article suggests some of Smith’s uses for the notebooks, such as noting down locations for collecting specimens or describing how to construct tanks and troughs for filming individual organisms. Using a wide range of supplementary sources, including images, videos and an interactive map, I argue that Smith’s work amounted to a form of scientific ‘craft’, which blended across his experimentation with photographic media and scientific observation. Dismantling the long-held belief that F Percy Smith worked entirely alone, the article uses the notebooks as an opportunity to highlight for the first time the role that two women played in Smith’s studio-laboratory: his wife, Kate Smith, and his assistant, Phyllis Bolté. The notebooks are a key source for understanding the production of natural history films of the interwar period, including the popular Secrets of Nature (1922–1933) series. The article reflects on what media scholars can learn from taking a closer look at the materials and methods used for making films of this kind.
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Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Instrumental networks
(2023-10-18)
Akkermans, Emily
;
Wilder, Kelley
;
Thompson, Samantha
This paper presents three pieces that use objects, or object types, to reveal the material, personal, institutional and commercial networks that surrounded the introduction and successful use of instruments, systems and techniques. The objects explored are: the Hourly Signal Relay, used within the time signal system of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, from the mid-nineteenth century; photographic glass plates from the British 1874 transit of Venus expeditions; and an electronic imaging tube, Lallemand’s camera, developed in Paris and used at the Lick Observatory in California in the 1960s. Each story uses examples of failure as a means of highlighting a lack of robustness in or effort required to maintain these networks. Once created, however, such networks could, as the second two stories note, go on to develop and support alternative approaches, helping to create success from apparent failure. Nevertheless, complexity, failure and fragility have also led to the underrepresentation or obscurity of these objects in museum collections, until given focused attention in these studies. The paper forms part of a collection of articles: Revealing observatory networks through object stories. The other papers in the collection are ‘Object itineraries’, and ‘Observatory audiences’ and the genesis of the collection is discussed in the ‘Introduction’.
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Obituary: John P Ward (29 July 1940–9 April 2023)
(2023-10-18)
Pritchard, Michael
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Trevor Pinch’s legacy for media studies
(2023-10-18)
Tosoni, Simone
It is well known that throughout his long and brilliant career Trevor Pinch was a leading scholar in at least three research fields. In the sociology of scientific knowledge he was one of the most influential contributors, both alone and in collaboration with his mentor Harry Collins (see in particular Collins and Pinch, 1982; and Pinch 1985, 1986). He co-founded and developed the sociology of technology and the field of science and technology studies for which, in 2018, he was awarded the prestigious John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Later in his career, he was a core player in the field of sound studies (see for example Pinch and Bijsterveld (eds), 2003, 2004, 2012), to which he was led by his work on the Moog synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco, 2002) and his passionate love for music. However, the work of Trevor Pinch, and in particular the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach that he developed with Wiebe Bijker (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), has also been influential for many other neighbouring research fields to which he contributed only indirectly or episodically. This is the case for organisational studies, for example, or for studies of innovation. It is also the case for media studies. In what follows, as a media scholar, I represent the intellectual debt of my field to the work of Trevor Pinch. To do so, I will first clarify the role played by SCOT in the disciplinary tradition of media studies, in particular in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century. I will then move my focus to lesser-known works by Trevor Pinch on mediated communication, which he sporadically addressed as part of his broader research interests (related, for example, to the practice of selling). My attempt will be to retrace the tenets of Pinch’s own take on media as they emerge both from these too rare interventions and from the methodological reflection he has dedicated to the topic. In my final remarks, I will draw on the two preceding sections to highlight some other possible points of crosspollination between the current field of media studies and Trevor Pinch’s work, that remain to be explored in depth.
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Science Museum Group Journal Issue 20

Science Museum Group Journal Issue 20

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