Accounts of the life of Scottish engineer James Watt have tended to take a rather monocular approach to his life’s work – primarily concentrating on the steam engine. However, the evidence of Watt’s workshop, preserved at the Science Museum, points to the diverse nature of his interests, and particularly to the close integration of philosophical and pragmatic elements in his work. Here is the workplace of one of the savant-fabricants that Britain’s ‘Industrial Enlightenment’ depended upon. All was, however, underpinned by physical work and the creation of tangible artefacts that took into
This article argues that it is useful to see historical exhibitions as both responses and contributors to narratives about science that are circulating in the public sphere. It uses the example of the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus (which was the immediate predecessor of the Science Museum in London). The article demonstrates how, in promoting this huge exhibition and fighting for the necessary support and resources, leading scientific, cultural and political figures engaged with two rather different public interpretations of science’s past, present and future. One dealt with
When George Adams assembled a large collection of philosophical instruments for King George III in the early 1760s, he drew on a variety of printed books as sources of experiments and instrument designs. Most important of these was Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy by the Dutch mathematician and philosopher Willem ’s Gravesande, whose own collection of instruments is now in the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. Papers in the Science Museum archives reveal the specific practices through which Adams used books such as Mathematical Elements in the course of his business. These techniques
The arrival of William Bally’s set of miniature phrenological specimens in Manchester for the Wellcome Collection exhibition Brains: The Mind as Matter (26 July 2013 – 4 January 2014) was an ideal time to reassess the mysteries of its production – was it made in Manchester or Dublin? In what context was it produced? Phrenology – the study of the shape and contours of the skull to determine mental faculties – has received attention from historians. But the origin and context of this object, although long part of the canon of 19th-century phrenology, has never been fully explored. Close