Stories from the stores

I’ve recently returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Belgium (….a terribly underrated destination – no, really). While there, I persuaded my family to spend time exploring the World War One battlefields around Ypres.  I was particularly interested in surviving evidence of frontline medical services.

Remains of the Advanced Dressing Station at Essex Farm, north of Ypres, Belgium (Stewart Emmens)

This was once an Advanced Dressing Station (ADS), at a site known as Essex Farm. One of the largest surviving groups of military buildings in the area, these damp, claustrophobic structures were comparatively comfortable. Built in 1916, they replaced a more temporary station established the year before.

Close to the frontline trenches, it provided basic care for those wounded with each of the rooms having a designated function.  The largest were reserved for stretcher cases, those awaiting evacuation and for applying dressings and performing emergency operations.  Smaller rooms provided a kitchen, toilet and an area to treat the ‘walking wounded’.

Interior of Dressings room / Operating theatre at Essex Farm (Stewart Emmens)

The ADS was one of a chain of facilities that an injured soldier could pass through. From here, the wounded would be evacuated back to Main Dressing Stations, Casualty Clearing Stations and Base Hospitals further behind the lines.

As a warm up for Ask a Curator day tomorrow, I thought I would give you an in-depth look at one of our objects that has been generating a lot of comments on Twitter.

Artificial arm, 1850-1910 (A602817, Science Museum, London)

You may remember a post by my colleague, Stewart, on Arms, legs and ex-Servicemen showing our 20th century collection of prosthetic limbs. The history of artificial limbs is inseparable from the history of amputations and closely linked to warfare. 

This artificial arm was made for someone who had their left arm amputated above the elbow. Many people have commented on how sinister and robotic the arm looks. This is probably because you can see all of the joints in each of the fingers and the wrist. Unlike some modern prosthetics no attempt has been made to replicate the appearance of a hand, just its function - each of the fingers have some movement, the wrist and elbow rotate and move up and down.

A great deal of craftsmanship has gone into the arm. By the beginning of the 1800s, specialist prosthetic makers took over the jobs of making them from carpenters, blacksmiths and armour makers. Some prosthetic limb makers originating in the 1850s such as Hanger and Chas A. Blatchford are still in business today.

Aritfical arm by Chas A Blatchford, 1943 (1999-547, Science Museum, London)

If you want to see the sinister looking arm, it is on display at Medicine Man at the Wellcome Trust. There are also a number on display in our Science and Art of Medicine gallery.

And feel free to ask for more details on Twitter using the #askacurator hashtag, or by posting a question in the comments below.

Is there a burning question that you’d like to ask a curator? Maybe what’s your favourite object? What’s the tiniest object in your collection? How do you go to the loo in space?

??! (NASA / Science & Society)

Well now’s your chance, because 1 September is ‘Ask a Curator Day’ – a unique worldwide Q&A session which lets you put questions to museums.

A crack team of Science Museum curators and other staff members will be standing by – so start thinking now.

All you have to do is tweet your question on Twitter using the #askacurator hashtag. If you don’t have a Twitter account, or your question just won’t fit into 140 characters you can also leave it as a comment below.

We’ll either tweet the answers or reply to your comments on this post. Particularly juicy questions that we want to answer at length might become the basis of future posts.

We’ll do our best to answer your questions, although some might take us a little while and we can’t guarantee to answer every single one.

Check out the two responses that our Transport Curator David made to this question that we were asked on Twitter: How did you get the planes into the Flight Gallery?

We’ve been setting the agenda on this blog for too long now – it’s over to you!

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how we got the aircraft into our Flight gallery, in response to a Twitter question. I said I’d been to our photo archive to see if we had any pictures of the 1960s aircraft installation, and I turned up lots of great images.

Well, the scans have just arrived, so for those interested in how to get a Supermarine S6B world-speed-record-breaking aeroplane into a third-floor gallery in central London in 1961, here goes…

Supermarine S6B in mid-lift (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B in the air (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B perched on a ledge (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B ready to go in (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B on final approach (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B has landed! The wings go on later (Science Museum)

And their suits are all still pristine!

On the 13th of this month was the centenary of Florence Nightingale’s death.

Florence Nightingale (A661274/1, Science Museum, London)

The Lady with the Lamp came to fame during the Crimean War by improving the standards of cleanliness and hygiene in hospital wards. Nightingale was believed to have dramatically reduced the death rates of soldiers from 40% to 2% in just two years. Recently, historians have suggested that the increase in survival rates was mainly due to improved sewage and ventilation systems, not just improved nursing standards.

Nightingale did do much to put nursing on a modern professional footing setting out not only hygiene practices but also moral and social conduct for nurses. A nurse must not be ”no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about the sick.”  The Nightingale Nursing School was set up in 1860 as part of St Thomas’ Hospital in London and it is still in existence today – now known as Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

Nightingale nurse figurine, 1963 (1984-1733, Science Museum, London)

Florence’s legacy not only lives on through training but also through objects in the Science Museum’s collections. Henry Wellcome collected a number of items belonging to Florence Nightingale such as her whistle, tea caddy, moccasins, parasol and shawl.

These objects are part of a number of famous person’s belongings - or relics as many people call them - that Wellcome acquired. If you visit the Wellcome Library take a look at the names that adorn the walkway around the seating area you’ll find that Florence is the only woman represented.

Florence Nightingale's shawl (A87224, Science Museum, London)

This shawl is now on show at the Florence Nightingale Museum where you can also see many other treasures relating to her life and work. The Wellcome Library also has an astonishing array of her papers.

James Watt died 191 years ago today. He was considered one of the most important engineers in the country, and after his death he was turned into a national hero. The result was a slew of statues, memorials and paintings – some of which will go on show in a new exhibition opening in spring 2011. More details to follow…

James Watt, Scottish engineer, 1792 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

When Watt was 59, his friend and partner Matthew Boulton introduced him to Carl von Breda, who painted the earliest portrait that that Watt was known to sit for. At the time, 1792, he was fighting to save their steam engine business from legal challenges, but was wealthy enough to have built his house Heathfield near Birmingham to suit his growing family.

James Watt from painting by Lawrence, 1813 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

By 1815, he was more relaxed, and more prepared to have his portrait painted. This one, by Thomas Lawrence, was much liked by the artist, who thought it was the finest he had ever painted, but the family – James Watt, and his eldest son James Watt Jnr – didn’t really care for it.

James Watt, Scottish engineer (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Another highly regarded artist, Sir Francis Chantrey, produced a marble bust for the Royal Academy exhibition in 1815. Watt was swathed in a toga-like cloak as a 19th century conceit to show he was a true philosopher.

The bust was much copied, and even Watt had a go, using the bust to test his sculpture-copying machines. He wrote to a friend “I do not think myself of importance enough to fill up so much of my friends’ houses as the original bust does”.

James Watt, British engineer, as a young man, c 1769 painted 1860. Science Museum / Science & Society

This was painted after Watt’s death, but he is shown as a young man studying a mal-functioning model of a Newcomen steam engine. The challenge of trying to get it to work put Watt on the road to perfecting full-size engines.

Bizarrely there was even a Japanese woodcut, prepared in the 1880s for primary school children, showing him testing the steam from a boiling kettle in his aunt’s house.

Increasing public access to our collections is one of our main priorities. But what do you do when so many of your objects are in storage?

Artificial limbs in our London store (Stewart Emmens)

Our medical collections are built on the legacy of Victorian entrepreneur Henry Wellcome. He was a millionaire who collected far, wide and en masse. Even our main, highly object-rich medical gallery can only contain a small fraction of the vast number of objects we look after. At our London store, over 40 rooms are devoted to medical objects – and that’s just the smaller stuff.

Roman objects in storage (Stewart Emmens)

Luckily, the web provides an alternative form of access. For the past year Brought to Life, the Science Museum’s history of medicine website has been receiving both acclaim – and many thousands of visitors.

The site has long been the main project for us medical curators – pretty much consuming our working lives for the past three years. It was recently re-launched, with even more themed content, more interactives and hundreds more objects.

Indeed, objects are very much the heart of this website. Images of over 4,000 of them are now accessible, many of objects which have never been on display. It was a personal privilege to be given the chance to select most of them.

Wax model of decaying corpse, Italy c.1774-1800 (Science Museum)

New additions include one of the earliest stethoscopes, Islamic pharmacy jars, relics from Victorian asylums, a mobile X-ray vehicle and apparatus from the early days of penicillin.

Also tucked away are objects that reflect the eclectic fringes of Wellcome’s collecting. Look deep enough and you might find a hangman’s rope, a loveable netsuke, Queen Victoria’s slippers, relics from a doomed Arctic expedition – then there’s the just plain weird stuff.

Enjoy!

One of the highlights of a visit to Wells Cathedral is seeing the oldest surviving clock face in the world, in the north transept. Above the face, jousting knights on horseback do battle, with one unfortunate being knocked over. Looking on, a figure called Jack Blandifer chimes bells each quarter-hour. Originally the knights charged every hour, but due to tourist demand the display was modified in the 1960s to allow a shorter joust to happen every 15 minutes. The knights switched from horsepower to electric power. Here’s a video.

A 1961 travel advertisement for Wells (NRM / Science & Society)

Other parts of the clock remained hand-wound, carrying on a tradition of over 600 years. It’s a time-consuming job and the clock is now going to be wound automatically.

However, the original medieval clock from Wells Cathedral is still wound by hand. The mechanism, which was installed in the cathedral in 1392, was replaced in 1837. It came to the Patent Museum in 1871, and has been part of the Science Museum’s collections since 1884. Currently on display in our Measuring Time gallery, it’s the second-oldest working mechanical clock in England, after the one in Salisbury Cathedral (although that is not regularly run).

A detail of the Wells clock (Science Museum).

The daily job of winding the clock is done by Richard from our Conservation team. Each morning, he winds the clock’s three gear trains (one would have controlled the interior and exterior clock faces, one the hour actions and one the quarter-hour actions). The whole process can take up to half an hour and Richard says it’s a very good workout! Read an interview with him here.

Fast hands: Richard winds the Wells (Alison Boyle).

The clock keeps very good time, only losing a few seconds per day. And our Conservation team keeps other clocks in the gallery running too – more about that in a future blog.

Are you off to the beach this August? Lucky you – I’m stuck at work (hey, but life’s always a beach here at the Science Museum). If you’re planning a holiday in the UK, you could tread the sands at Cromer, and follow in the footsteps of Albert Einstein.

A poster promoting rail travel to Cromer, 1923-47 (National Railway Museum / Science & Society)

Einstein’s trip to Norfolk in 1933 wasn’t a holiday. As a famous German Jew, he had been subject to Nazi threats. He was invited to stay in Cromer by the MP and antifascist campaigner Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson.  

Einstein’s visit has (very loosely in some cases!) inspired several works, including Mark Burgess’s radio play Einstein in Cromer, Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, and a song of the same name by Counting Crows.

Einstein with Locker-Lampson, 1933 (NMPFT/Syndication International/Science & Society)

More directly inspired by Einstein’s Cromer sojourn was a bust by Jacob Epstein. The famous scientist sat for the famous sculptor in a hut at nearby Roughton Heath. You can see our copy in the Inside the Atom display on the second floor.

Epstein's bust of Einstein (Science Museum).

It has been suggested that Epstein, who was also Jewish, was instrumental in persuading his sitter to speak out publicly against Nazi persecution. At a meeting in London’s Royal Albert Hall, carefully stage-managed by Commander Locker-Lampson and attended by thousands of people, Einstein spoke in faltering English about the responsibility of all citizens to guard Europe against another disastrous war. On 7 October 1933, he set sail from Southampton, leaving Europe behind for a new life in the United States.

Have you had any luck with the Perseid meteor shower? Some UK skywatchers were foiled by the weather, but many people here and around the world enjoyed stunning views.

1866 was also a good year for the Perseids. Alexander Herschel observed the shower from his family home at Collingwood in Kent. For several years, Herschel had been carrying out a regular programme of meteor observations, using a spectroscope to look for the characteristic signatures of different elements. As well as the Perseids, he observed the Leonids, Orionids and many less well-known showers – once, according to a friend, making use of the good viewing conditions at Ipswich Racecourse.

Alexander Stewart Herschel (Science Museum)

As well as his spectroscopic observations, Herchel helped to identify the radiant points of various meteor showers, and link the appearances of the showers to various comets. His work on the Leonid meteors enabled Giovanni Schiaparelli to pinpoint their source as Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

Alexander was the son of John Herschel, and was born in Feldhausen during his father’s famous observing trip to the Cape of Good Hope. The family returned to England when Alexander was two. 

John Herschel's observing site at Feldhausen, 1834 (Science Museum).

Alexander’s career took in the Royal School of Mines and physics professorships at Glasgow and Newcastle. After retirement, he moved back to his grandfather William’s old home at Observatory House in Slough. In later years he became reclusive, devoted to his meteor studies and often forgetting meals. He is buried at St Laurence’s Church, Upton, close to his illustrious grandfather. You can find a more detailed account of Alexander in this article by Peter Millman.