Stories from the stores

Stories From The Stores is six months old this week. Woo-hoo!

I’ve been looking over some of my posts. What strikes me most (apart from the appalling puns and gratuitous puppies) is that I’ve failed to say anything about transport beneath the sea. This is all the more remiss given that one of my best friends is a retired nuclear submariner.

Let me make amends. Fifty years ago, on 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh dived to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (in the Pacific Ocean) in a bathyscaphe (meaning ‘deep boat’) named ‘Trieste’. Here’s a model on show in our Docks & Diving display:

Model of the bathyscaphe 'Trieste' (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The Marianas Trench is seven miles down, making it the greatest known depth in all the oceans. Down there, the pressure on Trieste was eight tons per square inch. The cast-steel cabin weighed 12 tons and the walls were about 3.5 inches thick.

Attached to the bathyscaphe was a Rolex wristwatch, modified to cope with the crushing pressure. It kept ticking throughout the voyage, and we’ve a replica on show in our newly-refurbished Measuring Time gallery:

Modified Rolex 'Oyster' wristwatch, 1960 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Seven miles down! Does that not blow your mind? We’ve colonised land, we’ve walked in space and we’ve set foot on the Moon, yet there’s a wilderness on Earth we’ve barely seen. The deep seas are truly a different world. I’ll have more to say about submarine transport another time…

With last week’s opening of 1001 Inventions, we’ve been celebrating cross-cultural collaboration, and astronomy has plenty of examples. At the entrance to the exhibition you can see a display of objects from our collections, including this astrolabe made by Jamal al-Din in Lahore in 1666. The astrolabe is a two-dimensional model of the universe that can be held in your hand. It is also a beautiful demonstration of the way knowledge is shared between cultures.

Astrolabe by Jamal al-Din, 1666 (Image: Science Museum)

The first astrolabes were probably developed by the Ancient Greeks. From the 8th century onwards, the instrument was improved by Islamic scholars who took it as far as India and China. The astrolabe was reintroduced to Europe via Moorish Spain. By the 17th century the craftsmen of the Low Countries were producing elaborate instruments like this one.

An astrolabe that can’t be held in your hand is the Yantra Raj, one of the instruments at the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur, India. This giant stone observatory was built for accuracy rather than portability, to help improve the calendar. In 18th-century India people used a combination of the lunar-based Muslim and the solar-based Hindu systems. Both relied on observations made centuries earlier, so became increasingly unreliable. Jaipur’s ruler, Jai Singh II, commissioned the new observatory. This model, on display in Cosmos & Culture , shows one instrument called the Rashivalaya Yantra, with sundials to track the Sun through each zodiac sign.

Model of part of the Jaipur observatory (Image: Science Museum)

The observatory at Jaipur is just one of the examples that historian Simon Schaffer will be talking about during Space … a real frontier? at the Dana Centre next Thursday. He’ll be joined by Craig Underwood of Surrey Satellite Technology and our own Doug Millard as we explore celestial collaborations through the ages. There’s still time to book a ticket for the event, which also includes tours of 1001 Inventions and Cosmos & Culture – hope to see you there!

Just a quick one adding to my last post on human-powered transport. I found this great pic in our image archive of a sail-assisted wheelbarrow from China. It makes perfect sense, so long as the wind tends to blow in one direction most of the time.

Sail-assisted wheelbarrow, 18th century (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Until the nineteenth century, all freight not transported by muscle was sent on its way by wind, but since the development of steam power, we’ve tended to turn our back on this free resource. Now, in an effort to reduce fuel use at sea, one option might be wind-assisted ships, where a steerable sail can top up the power provided by the diesel engines. More on this another time.

In the meantime, here’s another wheelbarrow with a very different sort of power source:

Puppies in a wheelbarrow, May 1978 (Manchester Daily Express / Science & Society)

Oh, come off it! You’d need a heart of flint not to think that’s cute. It’s not all container ships and crankshafts here at Stories From The Stores, you know…

This is a sedan chair. Cute, no? These human-powered contraptions were all the rage in eighteenth-century Britain, part of a class of vehicle used worldwide. A pair of porters carried the chair by the poles, as the passenger inside looked on, wishing, I suspect, that she could have afforded a carriage.

Sedan chair, eighteenth century (Science Museum / Science & Society)

It can’t have been a comfortable ride, surely. I suppose it was the polite version of a piggyback. But I’ve never travelled by sedan chair. Perhaps somebody can put me right. This one’s on show in Making the Modern World, and we’ve also got a Bolivian hospital sedan chair in our medical galleries.

The wheeled version is known as the rickshaw, which was originally human-hauled (or pushed) and is now often pedalled. Central London is full of these contraptions, although there’s a Bill with Parliament at the moment to control their use (I think I’ll walk, thanks).

A logical development was to motorize the rickshaw. Here’s an ‘Autoriksha’ by the Indian auto firm Bajaj, at our Wroughton store.

Bajaj 'Autoriksha', 1982 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Autorickshaws (known as autos, tuk-tuks and many other variants) are used around the world, particularly in Asia and some American and African countries. With even the smallest motor comes mobility – which can unlock prosperity.

I’ll return to the theme of light vehicles in future. In the meantime, here’s a great sedan-chair nostalgia-fest created by two British railway companies in 1946, tempting tourists to historic Bath…

'Historic Bath' poster, 1946 (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

You can imagine the conversation. “You’ll never guess who I ‘ad in the back of me sedan chair the other day, guv…”

It’s 125 years since bicycles took the form that we know today. Then, cycling meant mobility in a world before mass motoring. Now, eyes are turning to cycling as part of a solution to urban congestion.

Transport for London is planning a turn-up-and-ride cycle hire scheme for the capital, going live this summer. One problem might be theft of the bikes. TfL’s response? “The bicycles will stand out as Cycle Hire bicycles. That way we hope people will think twice about stealing or damaging them.” You can see what they mean on the BBC website here.

Cyclists have long striven for lightweight and comfortable machines. New frame designs, gear arrangements, pneumatic tyres and suspension all helped in the development of the form we know today.

The ‘boneshaker’ was the first bike design with pedal drive to become popular. It was developed in France in the 1860s and widely taken up around the world:

'Boneshaker' bicycle, c.1869 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The ‘ordinary’ or ‘penny farthing’ was used from 1870 to 1890. The idea of the big front wheel was to increase speed - but it also made it dangerous and hard to ride:

'Ordinary' bicycle, c.1878 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Then the ’safety’ bicycle was introduced in 1885. The diamond frame with chain drive to the back wheel was much easier and safer to ride, and turned the bike into a universal mode of transport:

'Safety' bicycle, 1885 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

We’ve examples of all three types in our Making the Modern World gallery, if you fancy a trip out this weekend…

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 has now been officially ‘closed’ at a ceremony in Padova (timed to celebrate Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons, which you can read about in a previous blog). It’s been a really successful global project, with 148 countries signing up and thousands of people around the world taking part in events ranging from backyard observing to major international collaborations.

Much of the material produced in 2009 carries the distinctive astronomy year logo (Credit: IYA2009)

The participants of IYA2009 produced a huge amount of promotional and outreach material – posters, stamps, coins, calendars, T-shirts, badges, books,  movies, and much more. And we’re teaming up with the International Astronomical Union to ensure that some of this is preserved.

Obviously it’s not feasible for us to collect everything, but we’d like the ‘Official IYA2009 Collection’ to be a representative sample of the fantastic activities carried out around the world last year, showing the different ways that the national nodes celebrated astronomy. (For example, in Italy the focus was unsurprisingly on Galileo, whereas here in the UK we made a point of mentioning that Thomas Harriot beat him to the first astronomical observation with a telescope).

The material will form part of the Museum’s permanent collections, providing a ’snapshot’ of how people viewed astronomy around the world in the early 21st century.

The lovely people at the IAU have volunteered to collect material on the Museum’s behalf. If you’ve got something that you think might be of interest, you can join in here before 28 February. Thanks!

I heard a really interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 on Monday evening that lifted the lid on the murky and frustrating world of British transport politics. You can listen again here for a few days.

It looked at the work of John Prescott’s transport ministry in the late 1990s, which developed a ten-year transport plan for Britain called, inventively, ‘Transport 2010′. Those ten years have come and gone and 2010 has arrived, so how far did we come?

Not far enough, said the programme. Politics has a way of scuppering grand plans, and Prescott and others reckoned transport plans suffered more than most, as they’re easier (politically) to cut when the financial going gets tough.

One part of the plan was to make big investments in public transport, such as buses. As I don’t drive, I end up spending quite a lot of time on buses, whether they get invested in or not. I think it’s probably fair to say they’ve got better in London (where I live) over the last ten years. But never have I felt like this:

'One way to pleasure - by motor-bus', 1921 (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

I’ll leave you to think up your own response to that caption… I’ve got a bus to catch.

The British inventor of the magnetic drum store, Andrew D. Booth, recently passed away so its a good time to remember the significance of his work for computing today.

Andrew Booth was a physicist and computer scientist who became interested in the structure of explosives when he was working in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. After WW2 he moved to Birkbeck College, University of London, where he met the physicist J.D. Bernal and began to use X-ray crystallography to look at the structures of crystals. The process of crystallographic research required an enormous amount of numerical work and analysis, so Booth wanted to create a computer that could quickly crunch through the numbers. To do so he realised he needed reliable computer memory, so he set to work looking at the options.

Thanks to a donation from Booth himself in the 1940s, the Science Museum has Booth’s original experimental Magnetic Drum Store (1946) on display in the computing gallery.

Booth’s original experimental Magnetic Drum Store

It’s an ad hoc affair, with string and wires sticking out. Few people would have suspected at the time that it was to make such a major contribution to the development of computing. But during the 1950s and 60s magnetic drums were an important memory device for storing data and instructions. Even today, your computer’s hard drive is likely to contain a magnetic disk.

Booth worked tirelessly with his assistant (who later became his wife) Kathleen Britten, in what was often no more than a two person team with a shoestring budget. Together they produced some of the earliest digital computers in Britain, such as the All Purpose Electronic Computer (APEC). The design for the HEC computer was to become one of Britain’s best-selling computers during the late 1950s.

As I mentioned last week, I went to the London Boat Show at the weekend.

ExCel exhibition centre, London (David Rooney)

The venue sits right beside the Royal Victoria Dock in east London, one of three built in the second half of the nineteenth century to keep pace with the capital’s expanding maritime trade. They’re quite majestic.

It was my first visit to the Boat Show. Essentially, it’s one vast exhibition centre stuffed to the gunwales with pretty much everything you’ll ever need to enjoy a life of leisure on the water. A few hardy souls braved the rain for some yachting demonstrations outside in the dock.

Royal Victoria Dock at London Boat Show, 2010 (David Rooney)

But amidst the recreation, three things caught my eye. First was the sheer scale of the dock. Those white yachts are enormous, yet they’re dwarfed by their surroundings. In their past life these docks were teeming with ships keeping Britain’s economy afloat.

That thought was reinforced by a new sculpture on the dockside, called ‘Landed’, a tribute to the workers of the Royal Docks. It’s a beautifully detailed piece (photographed badly).

'Landed' sculpture, Royal Victoria Dock (David Rooney)

That was our maritime past, but what about today? I chatted to a couple of Royal Navy officers involved in counter-piracy work off the east coast of Africa. Each year countless pirate attacks take place on commercial ships off the Somalia coast and in the Gulf of Aden. Navies around the world are fighting back, but it’s a tough job.

Modern piracy is one area where I want to expand the Science Museum’s collections. Any ideas or leads would be very welcome…

I’m off to the London boat show tomorrow. It’s being held at an exhibition centre beside an old dock in east London, so there’s plenty of water to show off  the yachts.

I truly love that part of London. Not so long ago, the docklands area was teeming with maritime activity, but now it’s mostly pleasure craft occupying the spaces left behind when the working docks moved down-river to places like Tilbury. But just fifty years ago, Londoners were much closer to their ships, as were the residents of other port cities.

I’ll not dwell on that story right now. Instead, let me show you this terrific painting. It’s one of a set made in 1963 to hang on the end walls of our then-new Shipping Galleries, and they’re still in place if you’d like to see them in the flesh. They’re huge! This one shows mechanical handling at the dockside, 1960s-style:

'Mechanical handling at the docks', 1963 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

That was the height of modernity back then, but in the subsequent half-century, everything’s changed. Here’s your homework. To dip your toe into the modern maritime world, grab a copy of Marc Levinson’s recent book, The Box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger. Believe me, it’s a very interesting story.

More on all this another day, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in a rather left-field take on rivers, docklands and the future, you might like this free event I’m involved with on 1 February at our Dana Centre, called ‘Time and the Moon’. I’ll be talking with others about how the Moon is a common thread linking places, people and periods. Maybe see you there?