01 Spring 2014 Issue 01
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. It includes new research, for example, on William Bally's set of phrenological heads (one of the Science Museum's most beautiful objects) and on the historical significance of James Watt's workshop, as well as a close look at how eighteenth-century instrument makers used printed books . Discussion papers explore ideas about heroism and the effectiveness of the movement to engage the public with science.
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Editorial
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Coming home - Bally’s miniature phrenological specimens
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Reading, writing, drawing and making in the 18th-century instrument trade
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Responding to stories: The 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus and the Science Museum
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‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965
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Watt’s workshop: craft and philosophy in the Science Museum
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On heroism
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Sputnik and the 'scientific revolution' - what happened to social justice?
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Review: Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century, by Richard Sorrenson
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Review: Seven Ages of Science, BBC Radio 4
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Obituary: Frank Greenaway
Featured in this issue
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Sputnik and the 'scientific revolution' - what happened to social justice?
The relationship between science and the public has come a long way since the 1950s and the launch of Sputnik1. But have we achieved the deep-seated changes in economic and social attitudes that must underpin any real ‘scientific revolution’?
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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.
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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.