Past issues
23
Spring 2025
In the Spring 2025 issue of the Science Museum Group Journal, we step into our second decade of publication with an exciting suite of articles and reviews, with a special emphasis on research that considers future developments in museum practices. This issue features a keynote paper presented by Colin Jones at the conference accompanying the […]Issue 23 Editorial
Making museum research more visible: Open Access in the GLAM sector
Keynote: The science that Versailles forgot
Prototyping the Power Hall: a decision-making process
See, move, wonder: supporting young children with low science capital to learn from science museum objects
Medieval Women: Voices and Visions, British Library exhibition review
Book review: Applied Science: Knowledge, Modernity, and Britain's Public Realm by Robert Bud
Book review: Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933–53, by Dr Harriet Atkinson
Obituary: Brian Peter Bowers (1938–2024)
22
Autumn 2024
Tenth Birthday Issue
In this special tenth birthday issue of the Science Museum Group Journal we look back at the achievements of the last decade and forward to an exciting future of change and development. Retiring Head of Research at the Deutches Museum, Helmuth Trischler, reflects on what it has taken to create an integrated research museum; Will […]Issue 22 Editorial
Communities & Crowds: a toolkit for hybrid volunteering with cultural heritage collections
Tracing embodied knowledge in the history of science and medicine: expanding the role of film in historical research
In conversation: photographic curatorship and photographic cultures in museums and research institutions
The research museum – a place of integrated knowledge production
Power at play in paranormal history
Challenging museum narratives: the case of a Rhodesia Railways carriage
Provocation: Journal experiments in overlay, data and provisionality
Ten out of ten: a review of the last decade
21
Spring 2024
Welcome to Issue 21 of the Science Museum Group Journal. This issue features a special collection of four articles exploring some of the most significant scientific acquisitions made in recent decades, that of Professor Stephen Hawking’s office at the Science Museum Group and the papers of Professor Hawking at the University of Cambridge. Here Tilly […]Issue 21 Editorial
Theory and every thing: acquiring the office of Professor Stephen Hawking as a resource for history and museology
Collaboration and mediation: a guide to the creation of the Stephen Hawking Archive
We create the Universe: artists and scientists take on the Big Bang
Stephen Hawking’s superspace and supergravity blackboard: an iconic artefact in the making
Objects of the Mind: using film to explore the entangled histories of media and mental health
Book review: Stuff: Humanity’s Epic Journey from Naked Ape to Nonstop Shopper by Chip Colwell, Hurst, 2023
Review: Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design, Ashmolean Museum Oxford exhibition
Book review: The Museum of Other People, by Adam Kuper (London: Profile, 2023)
Jim Bennett (1947–2023): life as a museum practitioner
20
Autumn 2023
Welcome to the Autumn issue of the Science Museum Group Journal. 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 […]Issue 20 Editorial
Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Introduction
Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Instrumental networks
Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Object itineraries
Revealing observatory networks through object stories: Observatory audiences
Photography and electroplate in 1840s Birmingham
1876 and All That: the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ as a case study in crowd-sourced international public science
Tinkering with nature: craft, domesticity and female labour in F Percy Smith’s ‘Data’ notebooks (1925–1944)
How Britain’s railways prepared for nuclear war
Trevor Pinch: a personal and institutional appreciation
Trevor Pinch’s legacy for media studies
Obituary: John P Ward (29 July 1940–9 April 2023)
Book review: What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures
A history of ourselves?
Book review: Science Illustration: A History of Visual Knowledge from the 15th Century to Today, by Anna Escardó
19
Spring 2023
The Spring Issue of the Journal is now out! This is an open issue that includes research focusing on the Science Museum Group’s own collections – you’ll find a re-evaluation of an important electronic synthesizer with a focus on its role in live performance; a discussion of how an Indigenous Australian shield came to be […]Editorial: Issue 19
The Indian challenge and the rise of Manchester
When is a shield not a shield? Interpreting Indigenous versatility in an East End match factory
Supporting young children’s learning from science objects: the importance of play on gallery
‘We lost a type of job for a type of person in this country’: changing expectations of working in the UK scientific civil service
Collecting twenty-first century science: an analysis of public and professional perceptions
From obsolete technology to performance instrument: new live presentations of the EMS Synthi 100
Book review: Curious Devices and Mighty Machines: Exploring Science Museums by Samuel J M M Alberti (Reaktion Books, 2022)
18
Autumn 2022
Congruence Engine
We start 2023 with a double-sized special issue showcasing the Congruence Engine project. Part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Towards a National Collection suite of discovery projects, Congruence Engine explores how linking the nation’s collections using digital tools can enable new kinds of research and practice. Like the project itself the issue […]Congruence Engine in action
Origins and ambitions of the Congruence Engine project
The Congruence Engine Manifesto
History of communications and the Congruence Engine: early thoughts and possibilities
History of textiles and the Congruence Engine
The future: reflections on emerging machine-learning methods for digital heritage
Connecting places and collections
Connecting with industrial heritage collections using video production methods
Energising connections in museum collections
Collaborative conversation as a method for exploring multiple perspectives on 'community' and forms of knowledge in the Congruence Engine
Textiles in a modern age
The potential and pitfalls of machine learning in the Congruence Engine context
‘South Kensington is practically as far away as Paris or Munich’: the making of industrial collections in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Birmingham
Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections?
The role of digital humanities in an interdisciplinary research project
Surfacing multiple perspectives on keywords for the Congruence Engine; embracing multiplicity, interdisciplinarity, and mutual learning
Review: Living with Machines
Obituary: Cameron James Tailford, 10 October 1991 – 3 August 2022
17
Spring 2022
Welcome to Issue 17 of the Science Museum Group Journal. Here James Mansell et al explore how audiences can engage with sound objects through listening; Sophie Vohra traces the complex meanings behind commemorative celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and Efram Sera-Shriar goes back to the original photographic material to re-examine Harry Price’s famous […]Editorial
Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum
Smart and sustainable: collecting urban transport and mobility innovation in the 2020s
Staging listening: new methods for engaging audiences with sound in museums
The BepiColombo ‘model’: looking beyond the ‘original’
Black Arrow R4: the object behind the screen
Photographic plates and spirit fakes: remembering Harry Price’s investigation of William Hope’s spirit photography at its centenary
Commemorating the past, shaping the future: the jubilee and centenary celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway
Book review: The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe edited by Marcia Kupfer, Adam S Cohen and J H Chajes, Volume 16 in the Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middles Ages (Brepols Publishers: Tunhout, Belgium, 2020)
Book review: Native Americans in British Museums by Jack Davy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
16
Autumn 2021
Issue 16 features a strong strain of research from within the Science Museum Group. Robert Gwynne brings together railway and computer histories by looking at the long engagement of the railways with data driven technologies; Abigail Wilson looks at the impact of Joseph Whitworth’s legacy on Manchester’s built environment; and Alex Rose discusses a collection […]Editorial
Preserving skills and knowledge in heritage machinery operations
A long engagement – railways, data and the information age
The Whitworth: a place for Industry and Art
Reports and commands: deciphering a health exhibition using the SPEAKING mnemonic
From Renaissance medals to the Jaguar E-Type car bonnet: mechanised production and the making of luxury goods
Seismographs at Eskdalemuir Observatory, 1908–1925: tools for rethinking the origins of international cooperation in seismology
Philanthropy, industry and the city of Manchester: the impact of Sir Joseph Whitworth’s philanthropy on Manchester’s built environment
Book review: Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image
Book review: Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections by Professor Corinne Fowler
15
Spring 2021
This Spring issue reflects the wealth of research which continues to be conducted and written about despite pandemic disruption. A collection of papers associated with the Science Museum’s ‘Science City 1550–1800: The Linbury Gallery’ features an article by Jane Desborough and Gloria Clifton on how the absence of women in the sources on early modern […]Editorial
Science and the City: Introduction
Science and the City: Valentine Gottlieb, immigrant engineer of Lambeth: his trade card of c. 1810 unpacked
Science and the City: The role of women in the science city: London 1650–1800
Science and the City: Spaces and geographies of Metropolitan Science
Clinical images, imperial power and Bhau Daji’s secret treatment for leprosy at the Royal College of Physicians Museum
Lyon Playfair: chemist and commissioner, 1818–1858
Inventor, devoted daughter, or lover? Uncovering the life and work of Victorian naval engineer Henrietta Vansittart (1833–1883)
‘Iron lung’ as metaphor
‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe
Book review: Exploring Emotion, Care, and Enthusiasm in “Unloved” Museum Collections, edited by Anna Woodham, Rhianedd Smith and Alison Hess, Leeds, ARC Humanities Press, 2020
Obituary: Dame Margaret Weston, DBE, FMA (7 March 1926–12 January 2021)
14
Autumn 2020
Special issue: Curating medicine
The curators of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries reflect on their experiences of creating these significant new displays at the Science Museum in London.Editorial
Contagious Cities: an international collaborative enquiry
Artist interviews – new art for Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries
Curating Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries
Rapid Response Collecting and the Irish Abortion Referendum
The valuable role of risky histories: exhibiting disability, race and reproduction in medical museums
Misbehaving Bodies: exhibiting illness
AIDS memorials from obituaries to artworks – a photo essay
13
Spring 2020
A reminder of the richness of our cultural spaces and the research relating to them, including a conversation among curators and researchers exploring the politics behind the redisplay of the ‘Blue Whale’ at the Natural History Museum. Meanwhile, writing-prize winner Daniel Belteki traces the journey of an astronomical model from creation through various displays to its deaccession.Festschrift: Ways of curating: introduction to a mini-festschrift in honour of Robert Bud
Festschrift: At the Boundary between Science and Industrial Practices: Applied Science, Arts, and Technique in France
Festschrift: of mice and myths: challenges and opportunities of capturing contemporary science in museums
Festschrift: experimenting with research: Kenneth Mees, Eastman Kodak and the challenges of diversification
Festschrift: how do we value artefacts in museum research?
Why the anonymous and everyday objects are important: using the Science Museum’s collections to re-write the history of vision aids
Projecting soldiers’ repair: the ‘Great War’ lantern and the Royal Society of Medicine
A model instrument: the making and the unmaking of a model of the Airy Transit Circle
Wounded – an exhibition out of time
Curating Ocean Ecology at the Natural History Museum: Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin in conversation with Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade
A museum by the people for the people? A review of St Fagans National Museum of History’s new galleries
Review: Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at the World’s Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century
Book review: Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration, The University of Chicago Press, 2019, by Vanessa Heggie
Book review: Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, by Richard Noakes
12
Autumn 2019
A look at how museum-academic partnerships can be improved, a mini-collection of papers on 'Technologies of Romance' and the role of enthusiast expert groups as ambassadors for stored collections.Technologies of Romance: introduction
Technologies of Romance: Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk (m) to a Telegraph Clerk (f): the material culture and standards of early electrical telegraphy
Technologies of Romance: on the choice of a typeface for a book and the possibilities for technological Romance
Technologies of Romance: Mineralogy: a digital account
Technologies of Romance: looking for ‘object love’ in three works of video art
An overlooked eighteenth-century scrofula pamphlet: changing forms and changing readers, 1760-1824
New mobile experiences of vision and modern subjectivities in Late Victorian Britain
Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph
The museum micro-fellowship
Mobilising the Energy in Store: stored collections, enthusiast experts and the ecology of heritage
Collections development in hindsight: a numerical analysis of the Science and Technology collections of National Museums Scotland since 1855
Book review: The Life and Legend of James Watt by David Phillip Miller
‘Everything passes, except the past’: reviewing the renovated Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA)
11
Spring 2019
This edition features an eclectic mix of articles, ranging from a discussion of the Crystal Palace dinosaur models as heritage artefacts to an assessment of a game designed to teach history of medicine to nurses.Editorial
Wounded: ‘They had no fever…’ Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) and his method of gunshot wounds management
Wounded: ‘A small Scar will be much discerned’: treating facial wounds in early modern Britain
Wounded: Healing communal wounds: processions and plague in sixteenth-century Mantua
Mind-Boggling Medical History: creating a medical history game for nurses
A discourse with deep time: the extinct animals of Crystal Palace Park as heritage artefacts
From the White Man’s Grave to the White Man’s Home? Experiencing ‘Tropical Africa’ at the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition
A history of amulets in ten objects
The provenance and context of the Giustiniani Medicine Chest
A royal gift? Mrs Strangways Horner’s small silver clock, 1740
In memoriam: Jeff Hughes, 1965–2018
10
Autumn 2018
Issue 10 celebrates female scientists with a mini-collection of special papers, marking 2018's noteworthiness as both the Year of Engineering and the centenary of women's suffrage. Read about the pioneering work of Hertha Ayrton, the first female member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and Blanche Thornycroft, a true pioneer among female naval architects.Editorial
The life and material culture of Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923): suffragette, physicist, mathematician and inventor
Engineering and the family in business: Blanche Coules Thornycroft, naval architecture and engineering design
Uncovering the secrets of Canadian Pacific
Wired-up in white organdie: framing women’s scientific labour at the Burden Neurological Institute
The history of women in engineering on Wikipedia
From 2D to 3D: the story of graphene in objects
The Panstereomachia, Madame Tussaud’s and the Heraldic Exhibition: the art and science of displaying the medieval past in nineteenth-century London
Ventriloquised voices: the Science Museum and the Hartree Differential Analyser
Tacita Dean: LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE
Review: Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, edited by Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
09
Spring 2018
Special Issue: The Material Culture of Energy
Issue 09 explores the world of energy, featuring research on lighting design in South America, a comparison of electrification in Canada and Japan and a study of the cultural meanings of the coal fire in post-war Britain.Getting to grips with energy: fuel, materiality and daily life
‘As snug as a bug in a rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires
Refrigerating India
Making Material and Cultural Connections: the fluid meaning of ‘Living Electrically’ in Japan and Canada 1920-1960
Visualising electricity demand: use and users of a 3D chart from the 1950s
Light as material/lighting as practice: urban lighting and energy
Networks of knowledge and power: working collaboratively on the HoNESt project
The language of Electricity: Jan Hicks in conversation with Bill Morrison
Turning energy around: an interactive exhibition experience
Collecting the personal: stories of domestic energy and everyday life at the National Museum of Scotland
‘The whole exhibition becomes the stage…’ – a journey through time by children for children as a new approach to peer learning
Energy/Culture: a reading guide for historical literature
08
Autumn 2017
The supersized eighth edition of the Journal includes a rare collection of papers on the theme of museums, a look at the cultural history of the wireless and a study of Dr Nelson’s Inhaler to explore the growth of inhalation therapy in the mid-19th century.Editorial
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
Museums theme – Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry and Cold
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
Museums theme – making Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine
Museums theme – Beyond the Black Box: reflections on building a history of chemistry museum
Adapting to the emergence of the automobile: a case study of Manchester coachbuilder Joseph Cockshoot and Co. 1896–1939
A tale of two telegraphs: Cooke and Wheatstone’s differing visions of electric telegraphy
Prosthetic limbs on display: from maker to user
Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of ’the ‘sound object
‘Great ease and simplicity of action’: Dr Nelson’s Inhaler and the origins of modern inhalation therapy
‘Not one voice speaking to many’: E C Large, wireless, and science fiction fans in the mid-twentieth century
‘Organising Sound’: how a research network might help structure an exhibition
A symposium on histories of use and tacit skills
Review: what should reviews do in an online journal? Towards a New Format
Review: More than colours (or why some Austrian school children might not want to eat red Gummy Bears anymore)
07
Spring 2017
Special Issue: Sound and Vision
Issue 07 of the Journal collects scholarly articles from research related to sound and vision from across the Group, with several focusing on sound and visual elements within collections, most of which are in store rather than on display.Editorial
Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing
Rather unspectacular: design choices in National Health Service glasses
‘A Chamber of Noise Horrors’: sound, technology and the museum
The Hugh Davies Collection: live electronic music and self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments, 1967-1975
Acoustics on display: collecting and curating sound at the Science Museum
Philip Carpenter and the convergence of science and entertainment in the early-nineteenth century instrument trade
Moments of danger: photography, institutions and the history of the future
Location, location: a polemic on photographs and institutional practices
Contexts for photography collections at the National Media Museum
Review: The Return of Curiosity, by Nicholas Thomas
Review: Science and Technology galleries at National Museums Scotland
06
Autumn 2016
Issue 06 of the Journal presents readers with several new research articles, including a refutation of early 20th-century working model interpretations of Leonardo da Vinci drawings and a look at Shizuo Ishiguro’s storm surge prediction machine.Editorial
Giovanni Canestrini’s models of Leonardo da Vinci’s friction experiments
Understanding storm surges in the North Sea: Ishiguro’s electronic modelling machine
Threading through history: the vertical transmission of Davy, Faraday and Tyndall’s lecture demonstration practices
Doping at the Science Museum: the conservation challenge of doped fabric aircraft in the Flight gallery
Pilgrimages to the museums of the new age: appropriating European industrial museums in New York City (1927-1937)
Problem/science/society
Challenges of conservation: working objects
Review: Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee (Royal College of Physicians, 18 January-29 July 2016)
Obituary: Brian Bracegirdle (1933-2015) at the Science Museum
Obituary: Dr Anita McConnell FRGS FRSA FRMetS (1936-2016)
05
Spring 2016
Special Issue: Science Museums and Research
Issue 05 features articles on themes including co-production, museum visiting as research and issues around the display of objects. They include an exploration of the role Flying Scotsman has played in the ‘preservation of authenticity’ in the context of Britain’s industrial heritage, and a look at the early use of statistics by Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau.Editorial
The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies
Private portraits or suffering on stage: curating clinical photographic collections in the museum context
A statistical campaign: Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau’s England and her Soldiers
Thinking things through: reviving museum research
Functionless: science museums and the display of 'pure objects'
Flying Scotsman: modernity, nostalgia and Britain’s ‘cult of the past’
Cosmonauts: Birth of an Exhibition
Review: The Fate of Anatomical Collections, edited by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg
04
Autumn 2015
Issue 04 of the Journal collates an interesting mix of original research and discussion articles, including reflections on the challenges of curating the Cosmonauts exhibition, analysis of the modern interest in space tourism and research into historic Leonardo da Vinci exhibitions and their associated models and objects.Editorial
Capturing the song of the nightingale
The Science Museum and the Leonardo da Vinci Quincentenary Exhibition of 1952
The birth of a collection in Milan: from the Leonardo Exhibition of 1939 to the opening of the National Museum of Science and Technology in 1953
A sustainable storage solution for the Science Museum Group
The Cosmonauts challenge
Through the lens of a space tourist
Review: The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: the (mostly) true story of the first computer, by Sydney Padua
Review: Fairfield Govan: visiting a future heritage space
03
Spring 2015
Special Issue: Communications
This issue of the Journal collects articles under the theme of ‘communications’. Articles include investigations of the role of non-users in the development of telecommunications technologies and of the historical antecedents of modern citizen science, and a look at the making of Information Age, the Science Museum's permanent communications gallery.Editorial
Museums as brokers of participation: how visitors view the emerging role of European science centres and museums in policy
Troublesome telephony: how users and non-users shaped the development of early British exchange telephony
The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording: Re-enacting Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s landmark 1913 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Information age? The challenges of displaying information and communication technologies
Embedding plurality: exploring participatory practice in the development of a new permanent gallery
Old weather: citizen scientists in the 19th and 21st centuries
Review: Cabinet of Curiosities: How disability was kept in a box
02
Autumn 2014
Articles in this issue of the Science Museum Group Journal include an exploration of the use of theatre in the display of particle physics, a description of a participatory process to co-create an electronic music exhibition and a look at the 18th-century concept of ‘genius’.Editorial
James Short and John Harrison: personal genius and public knowledge
Oramics to electronica: investigating lay understandings of the history of technology through a participatory project
Curating the collider: using place to engage museum visitors with particle physics
‘½ vol. not relevant’: The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell
Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
Science communication in Latin America: what is going on?
Chronometers, charts, charisma: on histories of longitude
Review: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude
Review: Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century, by Omar W Nasim
01
Spring 2014
This first issue of the Science Museum Group Journal conveys some of the breadth and depth of research surrounding the Group's collections and activities. New research on Bally’s phrenological heads and Watt’s workshop accompanies discussion papers exploring ideas about heroism and the effectiveness of the movement to engage the public with science.Editorial
Coming home – Bally’s miniature phrenological specimens
Reading, writing, drawing and making in the 18th-century instrument trade
Responding to stories: The 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus and the Science Museum
‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965
Watt’s workshop: craft and philosophy in the Science Museum
On heroism
Sputnik and the ‘scientific revolution’ – what happened to social justice?
Review: Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century, by Richard Sorrenson
Review: Seven Ages of Science, BBC Radio 4
Obituary: Frank Greenaway