This article examines the relationship between electroplating and photography in 1840s Birmingham, exposing significant improvements that electroplated silver offered to the daguerreotype process using recreative methodologies. These technologies were developed by a group of scientists centred around Queens College on Paradise Street in Birmingham, George Shaw (1818–1904), John Percy (1817–1889, John Woolrich (c. 1791–1843 and John Stephen Woolrich (1820–1850).

This article explores the work of scientific filmmaker F Percy Smith by examining two notebooks held at the National Science and Media Museum. It emphasises the role of craft in Smith’s working process, drawing attention to the range of everyday materials in his work, while underlining the contributions of his two assistants, Kate Smith and Phyllis Bolté.

From the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, Britain’s railways planned and prepared for a possible nuclear war. While hampered by a lack of government funding and guidance, they nonetheless endeavoured in the hope of repairing and rebuilding after nuclear Armageddon.

Cotton’s global ascendancy has been attributed to the rise of Manchester in the late eighteenth century. This paper argues that Indian cotton textiles were a global commodity long before British industrialisation. Manchester’s rise was a response to an Indian challenge.

This paper is based on prototype testing at the Science Museum that considered how to support young children’s learning from objects on gallery. It is argued that providing for and enabling play is crucial for young children in family groups to establish familiarity and context related to unfamiliar objects, and that this is associated with learning.

This biography of a shield in the Science Museum Group’s fire making collection focuses on its unusual curation within the Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances. By scrutinising Eurocentric ways-of-seeing in museums, the author suggests alternative ways of understanding the object’s significance.

This article examines how the Synthi 100, a synthesizer built for use in electronic music studios in the early 1970s, has been restored and re-presented as a live performance instrument.

Many UK government research establishments were transformed by processes of organisational change during 1970–2005. This article explores the outcome of those processes by drawing on a series of original life story interviews with twenty former government scientists.

This article covers the key findings from a set of qualitative and quantitative research carried out in 2019–2020. This study investigated the relationship between public and professional perceptions of contemporary collecting with particular focus on science, technology and medical museums.

Using Bradford as a case study this photo essay asks how is the term ‘textile industry’ defined and what museum collections are deemed relevant to it? It argues that radical and rapid industrial innovations demand that we reshape our ideas about textile manufacturing.

This article considers the role of machine learning in the Congruence Engine project. The authors propose that while machine learning and open datasets offer opportunities for the project, this will require a pipeline model with iterative stages of human intervention.

Over the past decade we have seen a dramatic increase in the capabilities of machine learning (ML), leading to a real and growing interest in the application and potential for projects such as Congruence Engine. This paper identifies the trends that are most likely to impact projects like Congruence Engine in the future.

This discussion paper will reflect on the contribution of DH to complex interdisciplinary projects, using the Congruence Engine as a case study. It will focus in particular on the value of DH, and DH researchers, in bridging perceived gaps between disciplines and in translating between the computational and, in this instance, the historical.

As an historian I am hoping the Congruence Engine can address specific weaknesses in the current historiography. General questions include, what is or has been the purpose of various textiles and who consumed what? How did this change over time? How did they get distributed? What is their provenance?

This article briefly describes the development of the Historic England Archive and how this has shaped its industrial collections. A case study describing the collection of a power-station artefact illustrates the challenges involved in collecting industrial heritage.

This article explores collaborative conversation as a method to surface multiple perspectives on community engagement and forms of knowledge creation in the Congruence Engine project.

This article explores collaborative conversation as a method to surface multiple perspectives on community engagement and forms of knowledge creation in the Congruence Engine project.

In this article, film is used to acknowledge the historical worker’s role as a maker of materials and knowledge. By operating textile machinery, museum volunteer Greg Kotovs makes manifest the embodied knowledge of the industrial maker.

How can digital methods be used to better connect and understand communications heritage collections? Potential areas of research, challenges and projects to pursue under the Communications strand of the Congruence Engine are discussed, in connection with trends in historiography.

This essay gives an overview of how ‘scale’ operates as a keyword within digital humanities as well as a number of cognate fields, including History and English Literature as a way of exploring its possible implications for a computational approach to research on museum collections.

How can we most usefully interconnect the collections of energy artefacts in our museums? The Congruence Engine project’s energy team explore the challenges and possibilities of doing so, focusing initially on the twin themes of steam turbines and coal-mining disasters.

A comparison of the early histories of the industrial collections within National Museums Scotland, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, and Birmingham Museums Trust, and the implications of those histories for their respective contributions to the distributed national industrial collection.

In this opening essay, we are looking to frame this special issue as an active unfolding of the process of creating a national collection, situating action research as a method of doing, of opening up, and of activating the multiplicity of ways of creating the connections that transform discrete ‘nationally held’ collections into a national collection that is born out of the process of doing historical research.

The origins of the Congruence Engine project in long-term curatorial, research and digital practice within the Science Museum and beyond.

Book review: Native Americans in British Museums by Jack Davy

Book review: The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Analysing the jubilee (1875) and centenary (1925) celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, this paper examines the forms and functions of commemoration cultures centred on important moments in this industry’s history.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harry Price’s famous investigation into the spirit photography of William Hope in February 1922, this paper explores the surviving records of the case, including printed materials and photographic evidence.

This article considers the worth of the physical museum object and its value as a focus of appreciation and interpretation. The object in question is the fifth and final Black Arrow rocket that has been displayed in the Science Museum for over 35 years.

Through the recent example of the BepiColombo Structural Thermal Model currently on display in the Science Museum, this paper argues that models should be interpreted as original objects and not just as representations of the final product.

This article reports on the methodology and findings of the project ‘Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum’. The article argues that engaging with listening audiences can diversify and enrich museum listening scenarios.

This article explores contemporary changes to Scottish urban transport as a microcosm of the wider global smart and sustainable transport revolution, and provides two case studies of recent acquisitions made to the collections at National Museums Scotland.

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.

Editorial: Issue 17

Book review: Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections by Professor Corinne Fowler

Book review: Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image, edited by Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

An exploration of the buildings philanthropically funded by Sir Joseph Whitworth’s legacy and their impact on the development of Manchester’s built environment.

Four seismographs now preserved in the collections of the Science Museum Group were originally installed at Eskdalemuir Observatory, Scotland, between 1908 and 1925. By attending to their provenance, this paper reconsiders the role of John Milne in forging international cooperation in seismology.

This article challenges assumptions about relationships between the development of mechanised production technology and the making of luxury goods, showing how early development of stamping and pressing technology was driven by the manufacture of luxury metalware, not high volume commodities.

This study uses a mnemonic device called SPEAKING (Hymes, 1974) to analyse The Amazing You. This elaborate health exhibition, which ran at the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) from 2008–2017, aimed to affect visitor behaviours.

Informed by the ‘SMG Research Conference 2019: The Place of Industry’, this article reflects on the Whitworth’s history; from its founding principles to its new mission and vision to explore the continuing debates surrounding the relationship between art and industry.

Despite the steam locomotive being the persistent image of railway history, this article aims to show that the railway’s early use of electrical technology within its business systems meant it was in closer alignment with the emergence of computer technology and its forebears than is usually assumed.

A knowledge capture method for use with heritage machinery in museums and cultural venues to reduce the risk of knowledge and skills loss, including a case study involving the historic industrial textiles machinery at the Science and Industry Museum.

I will argue that ‘iron lung’ became eponymous as it connected the material reality of the NPV with imagined sensory experiences for publics in the UK, highlighting the often contradictory earlier metaphors of modernity and sound.

Dame Margaret Weston, DBE, FMA (7 March 1926–12 January 2021), obituary

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.

This paper introduces the three articles in this issue relating to Science City 1550–1800: The Linbury Gallery, which opened at the Science Museum, London, in 2019. It discusses the rationale behind the gallery and its relationship to collections and research.

This paper explores ways in which the spaces and geographies of three institutional sites of early-modern London – the Royal Mint, Trinity House and East India House – shaped and were shaped by their associated communities of knowledge and practice.

This article is about the Victorian naval engineer Henrietta Vansittart (1833–1883), who held patents for the Lowe-Vansittart propeller. She is a rare example of a woman practising in the engineering field in the nineteenth century.

This article explores Lyon Playfair’s life between 1818 and 1858, from his birth to his appointment as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh.

The wounds of Christ was an immensely popular motif in Late Medieval Europe. This collaborative essay discusses three different instances where the iconography is adapted to respond to the devotional and practical needs of the diverse and changing audiences.

This article traces the contributions made by women to the growth of the instrument-making trade and the emergence of a scientific culture in London between 1650 and 1800.

This article explores a collection of medical photographs and illustrations from the Royal College of Physicians Museum showing patients treated for leprosy by Dr Bhau Daji in the mid-nineteenth century.

The essay explores the curation of Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, an exhibition at Wellcome Collection. Bringing together two artists who explore illness narratives, the essay explores how the exhibition expanded on Wellcome Collection’s ambitions to challenge how people think and feel about health.

Based on the online repository AIDSmemorial.info, this essay highlights the diversity of AIDS memorials worldwide by defining twenty categories, reflecting on their origins and evolution as well as attempts to preserve this cultural heritage.

The changing representation of disability, race and mental health in European medical museums and the under-representation of reproduction; ‘risks’ involved in exhibiting related collections, and strategies to help rehabilitate these topics and their material culture in the future medical museum.

Ireland’s recent public referenda on LGBTI+ and women’s rights reflect a significant shift in Irish society. The National Museum of Ireland responded by collecting their material culture, working collaboratively with the public to fill collection gaps to better represent Ireland’s complex and difficult histories.

The curators of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries reflect on their experiences of creating these significant new displays at the Science Museum in London.

This article brings artistic and curatorial voices to reflect on the meaning of four major new art commissions in Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries. Curator of Art Collections, Katy Barrett, talks with artists Eleanor Crook, Marc Quinn, and Studio Roso.

Contagious Cities explored infectious diseases in Geneva, New York, Hong Kong and Berlin through a variety of cultural programmes. We examine its outputs and outcomes, the complexities of working with multiple stakeholders, and what might be learned from its approach to partnership and commissioning.

Editorial for special issue: ‘Curating Medicine’