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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.
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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.
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Science and the City: Valentine Gottlieb, immigrant engineer of Lambeth: his trade card of c. 1810 unpacked
In addition to uncovering the life and work of a relatively unknown immigrant engineer, this paper indicates how a detailed study of a small ephemeral museum object can unlock wider historical horizons.
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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.
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Visualising electricity demand: use and users of a 3D chart from the 1950s
A 3D chart of electricity demand in Manchester, 1951–54, is a tangible record of past practice, both of the electricity supply industry and its consumers. We offer a close inspection of the object, and generate ideas about the chart’s use and users.
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Book review: The Life and Legend of James Watt by David Phillip Miller
This wonderful book by David Philip Miller, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at the University of New South Wales, is the latest addition to the voluminous canon exploring the life and times of James Watt, engineer and polymath.
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Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph
This article describes the process and outcomes of a research project that involved reconstructing Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake’s ear phonautograph, an 1874 curiosity that used an excised human middle ear to visually inscribe sound waves.
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Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum
A reflection on reconstructing Zygalski sheets, a manual grid-based system used by the Polish Cipher Bureau and Bletchley Park to decrypt German Enigma cipher messages, for the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum Group from 2019 to 2022.