Stories from the stores

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.

It’s that time of year again, when the annual Perseid meteor shower lights up the skies. This year’s display promises a good blaze, weather permitting, as there’s no interfering moonlight.

The meteor shower occurs as the Earth passes through debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle and meteoroids burn up in our atmosphere. It gets its name because the radiant, the point in the sky the ’shooting stars’ seem to come from, is in the constellation of Perseus. Look for this near the familiar W of Cassiopeia.

A woodcut of the Perseus constellation, 1488 (Science Museum)

People have  observed meteors for thousands of years, but their origins were unclear. When this print of the great meteor of 1783 was made, there was still debate over whether meteors originated in the Earth’s atmosphere (‘meteor’ comes from the Greek for ‘in the sky’) or from space.

The meteor of 18 August 1783, observed from Windsor Castle (Science Museum).

By the time of the spectacular 1833 appearance of the Leonids, another annual shower, it was becoming apparent that the celestial streaks had an astronomical origin. Some decades later, Giovanni Schiaparelli linked the Perseids to Comet Swift-Tuttle.

This 1850s teaching card on comets and aerolites (another name for meteors) shows the 1833 Leonid showers in the corners (Science Museum).

If you fancy having a go at Perseid-spotting over the next few nights, here are some tips. And if you’re lucky enough to see some, why not contribute to the Great Twitter Meteorwatch?

In recent days, the aurora borealis, better known as the Northern Lights, have been visible at more southerly latitudes than usual thanks to solar storm activity.

If you tried to have a look but were scuppered by the weather, or like us at the Science Museum you’re just too far south, enjoy these images of the aurora from our picture library instead.

The aurora and icebergs in the Arctic, as depicted in the Illustrated London News, 1849 (Science Museum).

This 19th century magic lantern slide shows the aurora (Science Museum).

The Northern Lights over Iceland, 2005 (Jamie Cooper / Science & Society).

Of course, if you’re far south enough, you’ll be looking for the Southern Lights instead. The aurora australis is particularly elusive, as there’s a lot less inhabited landmass at high southern latitudes than in the north. It’s also been putting on a more widespread lightshow in recent days. But it would be hard to beat this view…

A time exposure of the Southern Lights, as seen from the Space Shuttle Endeavour, 1994 (NASA / Science & Society).

Monday marked 401 years since Thomas Harriot made the first recorded astronomical observation with a telescope - so one year since we opened our Cosmos & Culture exhibition celebrating Harriot and other astronomers.

For the last year, we’ve been lucky enough to have some of Harriot’s drawings on display, but for their long-term preservation it’s time to remove them from the light. This weekend is your last chance to see the centuries-old originals before we return them to their owner’s care and replace them with facsimiles.

Harriot’s first drawing of our Moon pre-dates any other telescopic observations. But Galileo beat him to it in discovering moons around Jupiter. Harriot probably read Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius around July, but by then Jupiter was too near the Sun for him to check it out. This drawing shows his first observations of the moons in autumn 1610. The first night wasn’t too successful – he noted, ‘I saw but one, and that above’ – but over the next year he made 98 further observations and tracked all four Galilean satellites.

Harriot tracks the Galilean satellites (Lord Egremont/West Sussex Record Office, used with permission)

By winter Harriot had turned his telescope on the Sun, risking blindness by viewing it directly with only mist to shield its fierce glare. In December 1610 he saw sunspots – one of several astronomers to independently discover them around the same time.

Harriot notes 'three blacke spots' on the Sun (Lord Egremont / West Sussex Record Office, used with permisson).

So with all these achievements, why isn’t Harriot as famous as Galileo? Well, unlike his Italian counterpart he already had rich patrons, so didn’t need to publish his work to attract sponsors. He may have also preferred to keep a low profile after a brief stint in prison as a Gunpowder Plot suspect. After his death, his astronomical papers lay undiscovered for over 150 years, so not many people have seen them in the last four centuries. If you’re in London this week, take a good look while you still can.

Recently, searching the physics collections on our object database, I was intrigued by an entry for a ‘radiation detector built to detect bees marked with radium’. Some research from our wonderful volunteer Eduard revealed more.

A discharge (gas) tube from Gilbert Tomes's bee detector (Science Museum).

The device was designed by Gilbert Tomes in the early 1940s. Tomes, a keen amateur apiarist, was seeking a way to track swarms by detecting when the queen bee left the hive. He tried tagging the queen with a tiny magnet to trigger a circuit as she left  – but as you might imagine, attaching magnets to bees was a tricky job.

Dabbing them with luminous paint proved somewhat easier, but Tomes’s photocell detector setup was triggered by other light sources as well as the painted bees. Then he remembered that the luminous paint contained radium (despite increasing awareness of its dangers from the early 20th century, radium paint was widely used in WW2-era instruments).

As part of their work for the Baird Television company, Tomes and his colleague Alec Tidmarsh had been investigating Geiger-Muller tubes, which at the time were little used outside scientific circles. They made a simple device to detect the radioactive bees, which they showed to London Zoo’s head beekeeper. Impressed, he sent a story to the Press Association, and suddenly the ‘Tomes Queen Detector’ was big news.

Tomes and Tidmarsh were deluged with requests for their Geiger counters and a few years later founded 20th Century Electronics (now Centronic), which became a global leader in detector technology.

Woodcut of bees in a herbal encyclopedia, 1497 (Science Museum).

Perhaps the company’s success improved Tomes’s wife’s opinion of his bee research. In his diaries on 19 September 1941, Gilbert noted: ‘Feeding bees with sugar syrup.  This was rather a sticky business and Mary did not like her kitchen being taken over.  She wanted to know why we had to feed the bees when they were supposed to be feeding us with honey’.

So, did any of you make it to Easter Island to see last weekend’s total solar eclipse? The path of totality crossed very few landmasses, so observing this eclipse was for the most intrepid travellers. Next weekend marks the 150th anniversary of a solar eclipse which was somewhat less remote – but observed by some very intrepid travellers, who for the first time used photography to settle a scientific debate. 

On 18 July 1860, Warren De la Rue and his team eagerly awaited the eclipse in their makeshift wooden observatory at Rivabellosa in northern Spain. The observatory and its contents – some two tons of apparatus – had been transported from Plymouth to Bilbao on board HMS Himalaya and then by stagecoach to Rivabellosa, where De la Rue persuaded a local farmer to set aside his threshing floor for the observatory.

De la Rue's eclipse observatory as shown in the Illustrated London News, 1860 (Science Museum).

The key piece of apparatus was the Kew Photoheliograph, designed by De la Rue a few years before. The first instrument specifically designed to photograph celestial objects, it was regularly used at Kew Observatory to record images of the Sun and Moon. The astronomers hoped that its wet collodion plates, with their short exposure times, could record the prominences visible during a solar eclipse. At the time it was not known whether these were part of the Sun, or an effect of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Kew Photoheliograph is on display in Cosmos & Culture (Science Museum).

Working in the hot Spanish summer, the astronomers only had a few minutes to develop each plate before the wet collodion dried. But they successfully recorded prominences on several plates – De la Rue described them with names including Cauliflower and Boomerang. When the photographs were compared with ones taken by Fr Angelo Secchi 500km away at Desierto de las Palmas, the two sets were so similar that they proved prominences are intrinsic to the Sun.

An expedition photograph of the eclipse before totality (Science Museum).

For a lively account of the Rivabellosa expedition – including the tale of how the observatory almost burned down just minutes before the eclipse(!) - check out Stuart Clark’s The Sun Kings.

The European Space Agency has just released the first all-sky map from the Planck satellite. The centre of the map is dominated by purple swirls from the dust around our Galaxy, but Planck’s main business is to look closely at the blobby structures visible in the map’s outer regions. These ’blobs’ show temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the remnant radiation from the Big Bang. Irregularities in the CMB became the seeds of today’s galaxies.

Planck's all sky survey (ESA, HFI and LFI consortia)

The fluctuations in the background radiation were first mapped by NASA’s COBE satellite, launched in 1989. An instrument on board also measured the CMB’s spectrum. FIRAS’s moving mirrors created interference patterns in a radiation beam, enabling the precise spectrum to be reconstructed. To the delight of scientists, the results perfectly matched the predictions of Big Bang theory.

This prototype mirror mechanism for the FIRAS instrument is on display in Cosmos & Culture (Science Museum).

The FIRAS prototype is on loan to us from the kind folks at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.  NASM’s display about the 1964 discovery of the microwave background features one of my favourite objects in any museum, anywhere. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson initially thought that an annoying background hiss from their radio antenna was caused by pigeon droppings, and used this trap to try and capture the pesky critters. It turned out they’d accidentally found what other scientists had been looking for – the Big Bang’s echo.

Recently, my colleague David mentioned that we’re planning a major history of science gallery as part of our master plan. It’s got us thinking about some of our favourite objects in the collections. Here’s one of my all-time tops:

'The First Years' plastic duck, c.1992

Yes, it’s a toy duck. But not just any old toy duck. It’s part of a consignment of plastic toys lost from a container ship in the North Pacific during high storms on January 10, 1992. Around 29,000 toys spilled from the container and have been making a swim for it ever since, to the shores of Alaska, surviving ice in the Bering Straits, and heading into the North Atlantic.

Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham have enlisted the help of beachcombers worldwide to track where the toys wash up. By following the mighty ducks and their floating friends, they can refine their models of ocean surface currents. It’s a great illustration of how scientists can come up with imaginative solutions to problems, and a charming example of members of the public working in tandem with scientists. Oceanographers track all sorts of flotsam – there’s also a flotilla of trainers bobbing about out there - but the storytelling potential of rubber duckies floating around the world’s biggest bathtub makes this case particularly appealing. You can find out more about Curtis and the ducks in his book.

The yellow ducks were accompanied by blue turtles, green frogs and red beavers who've since faded to white (Science Museum).

These toys are part of the first wave to be washed ashore – large numbers landed in Sitka, Alaska, ten months after the spill. We acquired these toys in 2005, following a response to posts we put on Sitka community websites under the heading ’Science Museum, London, looking for a duck!’  We decided they should travel to the Museum in a box, by air, rather than swimming for it…