Stories from the stores

Having written last week about my singular inability to ice-skate, my eye was drawn today to this poster in the National Railway Museum’s collection:

BR safety poster, 1995 (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

The caption reads ‘Watch your step on our platforms this winter… Leave the skating to the profesionals’. Wise words. Having said that, if I saw a briefcase-carrying penguin skating along the platforms at London Bridge station, I think slips and falls would be the last things on my mind…

It’s that time of year again. Temporary ice rinks are springing up all over the country. There’s a popular one at the Natural History Museum, for instance, and there’s a useful ’top ten’ rundown in The Telegraph. What’s not to love?

Well, whenever I’ve been foolish enough to agree to have a go, it seems as if everyone else on the rink is related to Torvill and Dean whilst I resemble a new-born Bambi on a bad day.

Couple skating on an open-air rink, 1930s (NMeM / Kodak Collection / Science & Society)

As I struggle round, clinging to the hand rail for dear life and wishing I had stayed in the pub, everyone around me is gliding effortlessly along as if born to the ice, chatting, laughing, arm-in-arm with their loved ones, strong-of-ankle and co-ordinated of limb, gently mocking the baleful-looking man who has just fallen flat on his backside for the twentieth time. I tend to repair very quickly to the bar.

But I now have the perfect solution. Next time I shall ride an ice velocipede.

Print of an ice velocipede, 1869 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Wouldn’t that be simply the best thing to use on the rink? I can just imagine the admiring stares and envious glances as I rode, stiff-backed, around the ice. I may not get up much speed, and I can imagine cornering would be rather tricky, but surely the knee-length boots alone would be sufficient to induce jealous swoons in my fellow skaters.

This rather splendid contraption is featured in a wonderful Victorian book in our library out at Swindon. Its cover bears the delicious instruction, ‘how to ride a velocipede: straddle a saddle, then paddle and skedaddle’. A lesson for us all there, I think.

I saw a splendid programme on BBC2 the other day. In his series, ‘Toy Stories’, James May is playing with old toys like Airfix and Meccano in an epic way. Last week, he revived the famous Brooklands motor racing circuit, opened in 1907 and closed in 1939.

Motor racing at Brooklands, 1927 (NMeM / Kodak Collection / Science & Society)

Malcolm Campbell (see my previous posts) was a regular racer at Brooklands:

Malcolm Campbell racing at Brooklands (NMeM / Daily Herald Archive / Science & Society)

It wasn’t just cars. Britain’s aviation industry arguably started here with the pioneering work of A. V. Roe and others. Roe’s company went on to make Avro aircraft elsewhere, including the famous ‘Vulcan’ bomber…

Avro Vulcan radar test model, 1950s (Science Museum / Science & Society)

…and our Vickers ‘Vimy’, used by Alcock and Brown in their first flight across the Atlantic, was built at Brooklands:

Vickers 'Vimy' at Brooklands, 1919 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

After the war, the site became a huge aircraft factory for Vickers and then British Aerospace (lots of Concorde was made here), and the old racing circuit was carved up, chopped off, built on and generally made into a non-circuit. Explore it on Google Maps.

How did May revive such a relic? With the aid of hundreds of  helpers, he laid three miles of Scalextric track round the route of the old circuit (flying over fences and factories, diving under roads and ditches, floating across ponds and cutting across housing estates) and, once built, pitted two tiny cars against each other in a nail-biting race to the finish. Top stuff!

You can watch it on BBC iPlayer here, and you can find out more at the excellent Brooklands museum website.

After over a year of delays, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has smashed its first particles together. The accelerator is due to commence full operation in the next few weeks (assuming it doesn’t get sabotaged from the future … or baffled by a baguette).

Particles in the LHC travel at almost light speed, guided by superconducting magnets. They travel inside a beam screen, kept at a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin (-268 Celsius), which shield the magnets from the intense particle beam.  Here’s our section cut from a spare beam screen.

Section of a beam screen from the Large Hadron Collider, 2001 (Credit: Science Museum)

Today’s particle physics poses a curatorial challenge, not least because Big Science is getting bigger. A few years ago we collected the Central Tracking Detector from ZEUS, a UK built-experiment which ran in Germany’s HERA electron-proton collider from 1992-2007. (As you can imagine from that last sentence, another challenge is remembering what all the acronyms stand for.) The photograph below shows the CTD being unloaded at Wroughton. It’s a pretty hefty beast but was only a small part of the whole ZEUS apparatus, which weighed in at 3600 tons.

Central Tracking Detector being unloaded at Science Museum Swindon, 2008

Techniques learned in building and operating ZEUS helped in the design and construction of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment, the biggest and most complex particle detector ever built. ATLAS is 45m long and weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower. In trying to preserve some record of it in our collections, we need to consider the implications of an experiment that dwarfs any of our galleries – how much of it would be enough to be meaningful in its own right? What do we do about the vast networks of cables and computers for sorting and analysing the data? And then there’s the small matter of getting large chunks of kit out of the LHC ring and back to the museum.

We don’t have all the answers, but it’s something I’ll be thinking about a lot over the next few months as we’re actively adding to our physics collections. Watch out for future blogs on the subject. And in the meantime, why not book yourself a seat at our Centenary Talk with Professor Brian Cox on 18 January, where you can find out more about what’s going on at the LHC.

Did any of you catch the BBC2 programme last week on the recent steam car speed record? I only managed to see a bit of it, but it looked great. You can watch it on BBC iPlayer for a couple more days here.

These guys have built a car powered by a steam turbine and, at 140mph, it’s broken the world speed record for steam cars originally set in 1906 at an impressive 128mph.

I blogged about it a while ago here, so rather than repeating what I said there about our lovely steam cars, let me instead show you the first ever steam turbine used to power a vessel – Turbinia, built in 1894. The turbine’s on show in our Shipping gallery. More on that another time, when I’m back at my desk…

Marine steam turbine from Turbinia, 1894 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Earlier this week I was at our site at Wroughton, Wiltshire, where I met a very special visitor. Joe Wright, together with his family, came to see one of our aircraft, a De Havilland Comet 4B jet. But it wasn’t the first time Joe saw our Comet at Wroughton – he was the very pilot who flew it in, thirty years ago! I was thrilled to meet him and talk about his experience.

Captain Joe Wright, 18 November 2009

The final flight of the Dan-Air-owned Comet 4B number G-APYD was also the last ever flight of this particular type of aircraft, as by the late seventies they had reached the end of their working life. We jumped at the opportunity of buying one (at a knock-down price), and on 1 November 1979 Captain Wright took its controls for the last time to bring it from London Gatwick to Wroughton. The co-pilot, Bryn Wayt, now runs the Dan-Air Staff Association, and tells the story here.

De Havilland Comet 4B jet at Science Museum Wroughton (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Thirty years on, the Comet forms a key part of the National Aeronautical Collection alongside such iconic craft as the Douglas DC-3 and the Boeing 247D, which I mentioned in a previous post.

In my last entry Seaplanes and plump-bottomed angels, I introduced some of the people behind the Supermarine 6SB, a magnificent seaplane that won the Schneider Trophy. One person I didn’t introduce was the plane’s designer, Reginald Joseph Mitchell.

This statue can be seen in the Flight gallery

Hewn from dark grey slate, his statue cuts an imposing figure in our Flight Gallery as it stares at the two great planes that made Mitchell’s reputation: the 6SB and the Spitfire. Mitchell was born in 1895 and at 16 he became an apprentice at the Kerr Stuart & Co locomotive works. He joined the Supermarine Works in1917 and progressed extremely quickly to become Technical Director. He came across as a shy person but this guy didn’t suffer fools and grew very angry if interrupted while in thought. Eyebrows rose to the fact he was married to a headmistress eleven years older than him.

In the sixteen years Mitchell worked at the Supermarine Company he developed no less than 24 aircraft. The Type 224 aircraft known as the Shrew was rejected by the RAF in 1934 – a major set-back. But Mitchell was working on something else as well…

The Supermarine private venture Type 300 (an all metal mono plane) with a Rolls Royce PV12 engine eventually became the legendary Spitfire with its Merlin engine. The Spitfire, first tested in 1936 was a major defence in the Battle of Britain and was still used by the RAF in the 1950s.

Spitfire on display in the Flight gallery

And what did Mitchell have to say? Apparently when he heard what the plane was going to be called he grumbled “just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose” .

The short posts continue, as I’m out and about for a few days. Last week I filmed a short TV piece about our Ford ‘Model T’ car. It’s one of our centenary icons, but I’m gutted to say it didn’t win our public poll on which was the most important. It seems the x-ray machine was more significant, so well done (through gritted teeth) to my colleagues in the medicine department…

Ford Model T car, 1916 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

I dare say I’ll change my tune next time I break something and need an x-ray, but I think it’s fair to say the Ford Model T was a hugely important product – not just in transport history but in manufacturing, labour relations, marketing and pretty much any aspect of modern industrial life you care to mention.

Henry Ford on a tractor, 1908 (NMeM / Daily Herald Archive / Science & Society)

Henry Ford changed the way we make things, sell things, buy things, want things and feel about things. When the Model T was first introduced in 1908, few people could afford a practical, reasonably powerful, robust car that could seat a family. By the time the seminal vehicle finally stopped rolling off the production line in 1927, over 15 million had been sold. Ford sold a dream, and a lot of people bought it.

I’ve just finished reading Robert Casey’s excellent ‘The Model T – a Centennial History’. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Rosetta spacecraft has just swung by Earth, on its way to a 2014 rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (or Chewy-Gooey, as the project scientists like to call it). The ambitious mission aims to attach a lander to the comet with harpoons. On board the lander is an instrument called Ptolemy, which will analyse samples from Chewy-Gooey to help work out what it’s made of. Here’s a model of Ptolemy on display in our Exploring Space gallery:

Ptolemy model in the Exploring Space gallery

In our collections you’ll find many objects showing how comets have fascinated us over the centuries. This beautiful illustration from a 16th-century commonplace book shows the comet of 1532, visible for over a hundred days.

The Comet of 1532 (Credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

The Great Comet of 1811 was clearly visible with the naked eye (its brightness has been surpassed only by Comet Hale-Bopp).  In the  early 19th century astronomy was all the rage, and the comet inspired many fads and fashions, including this French fan on display in our Cosmos & Culture exhibition.

French fan depicting the Great Comet of 1811 (Credit: Science Museum / Jaron Chubb)

Despite the public’s growing interest in science, the appearance of the spectacular comet still fuelled superstitions. In America it was blamed for a devastating earthquake, while Napoleon claimed it would bring him luck in invading Russia (which goes to show you shouldn’t believe in superstitions).

His compatriots fared better: 1811 brought excellent weather for vineyards and French wine-makers took the marketing opportunity of branding the fine vintage ‘Comet Wine’. Last year, a London auction house sold a bottle of 1811 comet wine for a staggering £37,900 – that’s around £400 a sip. I think in wishing Rosetta on its way I’ll raise a glass of something slightly less expensive…

Just short posts this week, as I’m mostly out and about.

The first proper motorway in Britain opened fifty years ago this month – the M1. It’s hard to imagine life without motorways – those snaking ribbons of tarmac, the service stations, the blue-and-white signs and the seemingly endless congestion. Do we love them today? Probably not, if asked, but back in 1959, the M1 was magical. People queued up to see the modern way to travel…

Schoolchildren at the newly-opened M1, 1959 (Manchester Daily Express / Science & Society)

Part of the magic must have been the sense of space, of an endless future unfolding. Or, less lyrically, the fact that the M1 was empty…

View from a car on the M1, 1960 (Manchester Daily Express / Science & Society)

Of course, that didn’t last. As the motorways spread, and filled up, they became less magical, more mundane. When the Transport Research Laboratory took a core sample of the M1 in the 1980s for tests, we’d already fallen out of love. The core came to us in the 1990s, and I bet it had been used as a doorstop before we picked it up…

Core sample of M1 motorway, 1980s (Science Museum / Science & Society)

It’s on show in the Science Museum’s Making the Modern World gallery, tucked away between a speed camera and a lawnmower. Important, but everyday. How quickly the lustre of modernity fades…

If you’re interested in our relationship with our roads, I can heartily recommend Joe Moran’s excellent new book, ‘On Roads’. A cracking read.