RT Journal Article
T1 1876 and All That: the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ as a case study in crowd-sourced international public science
A1 Graeme Gooday
A1 Alexander King
A1 Nela Spurna
YR 2023
VO 
IS Autumn 2023
K1 collection
K1 instrument makers
K1 loan
K1 Museum
K1 scientific apparatus
K1 South Kensington Museum
K1 Women
AB 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.
NO Importantly, Boyle does also note key pre-1876 legacies from the Patent Museum and educational collections. Boyle, 2019, p 488.
NO The archive.org digitisation of the 3rd final edition of the Catalogue was invaluable in analysing its content. https://archive.org/details/catalogueofspeci00soutrich/page/n17/mode/2up?view=theater [Accessed 10 February 2022). For the Catalogue second edition see https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/70819#page/35/mode/1up
For criticism of the Catalogue’s first (incomplete) edition see The Athenaeum June 17 1876 (Anon, 1876k).
NO Information kindly supplied by Tim Boon in searching the Science Museum instruments database for items listed as accessioned in 1876.
NO This Royal entourage included Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Victoria (Empress of Germany); the Duke of Edinburgh; the Princess Beatrice; the Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Edward of Saxo-Weimar. ‘News of the day’, Birmingham Daily Post, 15 May 1876, in British Library Newspapers  [Accessed 10 March 2022].
NO Thanks to Daniel Belteki for pointing out that the Astronomer-Royal, George Airy, declined to send some astronomical instruments to the Loan Collection, notably one telescope that was venerated by visiting European astronomers specifically (only) at the Greenwich Observatory. Private correspondence August 15 2023.   
NO Science Museum collections online: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co6956/kelvin-quadrant-electrometer-no-99-electrometer 
NO Science Museum collections online: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co6801/thomsons-portable-electrometer-1867-1888-electrometer 
NO Thanks to Tim Boon for granting access to his database of 1876 artefacts in the Science Museum.
NO An exception to this pattern of donating obsolete items is evident in several metal compasses from the exhibition still in the Science Museum collection (1876-735 through 1876-739): Glasgow University archives maintain that Thomson only started working on compasses in 1876, so the objects numbered above may have been made specifically for the exhibition (Jasper, 2014).
NO Max Thomas Edelmann should be distinguished from his son Max Edelmann (1874–1940), who took over his father’s company in 1913.
NO The Science Museum’s collections of Edelmann artefacts can be seen online: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/search?q=Edelmann 
NO For this source, in particular, we thank Tim Boon and the archivists at the Science Museum Library.
NO See mentions of Vansittart’s propeller in Anon, Catalogue of Ship Models and Marine Engineering in the South Kensington, 1889 (HMSO), pp 223, 233, 234, 347. Vansittart’s contribution was evidently reclassified for the 1876 Collection by curators not as part of the South Kensington’s marine collection but as part of its Patent Office collection of models. 
NO Throughout this study these women will be primarily referred to by the names documented in the exhibition’s Catalogue, i.e., the contemporaneous convention of acquiring the husband’s surname upon marriage. While not favoured by recent feminist historiography, this helps to articulate the commemorative purpose of the loans relating to a deceased spouse. 
NO Mrs Griesbach’s ‘Gas-Measuring Standard’ was accessioned in the previous year, 1875, and does not now appear in the Museum’s collections as an acquisition from a loan to the 1876 Collection. 
NO ‘Michael Faraday and Sarah Barnard’ (1821), Certified copy of a marriage certificate for Michael Faraday and Sarah Barnard, 12 June 1821, St Faith in the Virgin Parish Registry, no. 56
NO ‘Sarah Barnard’ (1800), Certified copy of a birth certificate for Sarah Barnard, 7 January 1800, Public Record Office, ref. RG 5/26. ‘Sarah Faraday (1800 – 1879)’, in The Royal Institution  [accessed 15 May 2022].
NO See Table of Objects in Figure 2 items 1 and 5.
NO We are very grateful to Erika Lederman for highlighting her extensive range of publications on Isabel Cowper, and for informing us that Mrs Cowper was not herself a daguerreotypist. The items that she offered to the 1876 Special Loan Collection were in fact likely to have been mementos of her husband (himself a patent officer with various patents in photography) that were passed on to Mrs Cowper upon his death.
NO Their marriage was listed in The Spectator (3 April 1852, p 9), http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/3rd-april-1852/9/births [accessed 3 July 2023]. 
NO UK Census Online, 1871 Census < https://ukcensusonline.com/> [accessed 15 March 2022]
NO UK Census Online 1881 Census < https://ukcensusonline.com/> [accessed 15 March 2022]
NO Given civil service rules at the time, Mrs Cowper could not be formally employed, so was paid not on a per piece basis, motivating her habit of signing all her negatives to prove her ownership over them – a practice that facilitated her revival as a nineteenth century feminist heroine in 2019 (Vellet, N.D.). Today many of her negatives are being held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and some of the images found online on a dedicated Instagram account: Cowper, Isabel Agnes, Isabel Agnes Cowper’s profile (Instagram, 2022)  [accessed 14 April 2022].
NO ‘A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Griesbach, John’, Wikisource (5 June 2013) < https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Griesbach,_John> [accessed 18 March 2022].
NO UK Census Online, 1871 Census  [accessed 15 March 2022]
NO UK Census Online 1881 Census  [accessed 15 March 2022]
NO See: Figure 2, items 11 and 12. In the Science Museum Archive Z 063 file pp 1–2, there is a copy letter from the Department of Science and Art dated 3 August 1876 to Mrs Griesbach thanking her for her letter of 20 July and for her proposed donation of a ‘valuable and interesting collection of apparatus, invented and made by the late Mr J.H. Griesbach, which you have been so good as to present to the proposed museum’.  
NO As mentioned earlier, it is possible that the ‘Gas-measuring Standard’ was accessioned in a year other than 1876. Looking at the technical files of these two musical objects in the Science Museum files might reveal more about their history.
NO See: Figure 2, item 9
NO ‘Mrs Winifred James Lockyer’, Find a Grave (25 May 2020)  [accessed 23 May 2022]
NO See: Figure 2 item 25
NO See: Figure 2, item 27
NO UK Census Online, 1871 Census  [accessed 15 March 2022]
NO ‘John Grantham’, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History (27 May 2019)  [accessed 29 May 2022].
NO ‘John Grantham’,  Prabook (2021)  [accessed 30 May 2022]
NO ‘John Grantham’,  Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History  (27 May 2019)  [accessed 29 May 2022]
NO This item 1876-1271 is now in the National Railway Museum collection and is on loan to Vale and Downland Museum Centre, listed as credited to Mrs Grantham. It is likely that further information on Mary Grantham herself could be gained from the Irish Census, but the records of appropriate years have not been digitised yet and thus remain inaccessible at present.
NO Science Museum Inventory of Objects (1876).
NO For a sceptical view of the success of the 1876 Loan Collection, see Preece, 1882.
NO These included 1876-1282 Highton’s single needle telegraph; 91.
NO [61 records credited to the Admiralty Hydrographic department – 5 deaccessioned] Science Museum Ledger for 1876: 1876-511; 800 to 837; 988-993; 1189; 1206; 1207; 1208; 1209; 1444; 1445]
NO Science Museum Ledger for 1876: 769; 1190; 1201; 1202; 1203; 1203/6; 1203/7; 1203/8; 1203/9; 1203 pt 1–5; 1204; 1204 pt 1 and 2.
NO See ‘Loan Collection Of Scientific Apparatus’, The Times, 3 April 1877, p 8. The Times Digital Archive, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=leedsuni&id=GALE|CS135313539&v=2.1&it=r&sid=bookmark-TTDA&asid=52f795cc [Accessed 6 September 2023]
NO A list of least some documented returns of 1876 loans to their lending exhibitors can be found in Science Museum Archive file Z 039/1. Thanks to Tim Boon for drawing this file to our attention. 
NO We thank the anonymous referee who suggested that the subsequent fate of the Loan Collection in 1880 can be seen in discussion in Joseph Hooker’s papers as Royal Society President. We anticipate that this source can be investigated thoroughly in a future project focused on the later fate of the 1876 Loan Collection donations. 
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/232013
UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/1876-and-all-that-the-special-loan-collection-of-scientific-apparatus-as-a-case-study-in-crowd-sourced-international-public-science/
WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30