Stories from the stores

I was walking up Kingsway at the weekend, and was stopped in my tracks by the most striking sculpture I’ve seen in a long time:

'Square the Block', Richard Wilson, Kingsway (David Rooney)

Square the Block, by internationally-renowned sculptor Richard Wilson RA, is a five-storey addition to a chamfered corner of a London School of Economics building.

I must admit to being a huge fan of Wilson’s work. I first encountered it in 2004, when I visited the Saatchi collection at London’s County Hall. One exhibit was Wilson’s 20:50, a room full of sump oil, which I found enchanting.

Wilson is also responsible for an artwork that’s closer to (my) home. Slice of Reality is a section of ship planted on the beach off the Greenwich peninsula, near the O2 (what used to be the Millennium Dome).

'Slice of Reality', Richard Wilson, Greenwich (David Rooney)

To make the sculpture, Wilson bought an old sand-dredger called Arco Trent, built in Devon in 1971, and had it chopped up in a shipyard on the River Tees before fixing it to the Greenwich beach.

I met Wilson on board the ship a couple of years ago, when he opened it for London Open House (a weekend when buildings that are normally off-limits throw open their doors to the public). He told me it is a perfect site for drawing and thinking, and I must say the views from its sun-drenched superstructure were magnificent.

We’ve got a handful of dredger models on show at the Science Museum, including Prins der Nederlanden, built three years before Arco Trent:

Model of 'Prins der Nederlanden', 1968 (detail, David Rooney, March 2010)

Extra points for anyone who can find the other two (much older) model dredgers in the gallery…

I was in Cambridge last week for a couple of meetings. It’s a glorious city. The buildings reek of history and tradition, the streets are filled with bright folk lost in dreamy thought and the river carries its languorous cargo of students and tourists in pole-driven punts, as depicted in this poster from the NRM collection:

'St John's, Cambridge' railway poster (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

And then there’s the bicycles. Cambridge is teeming with them, and whilst I’m all for cycle-friendly streets, I need eyes in the back of my head when I want to cross the road…

Most Cambridge bikes are pretty ordinary, but occasionally something special appears. Here’s a great picture of the ‘Cambridge Duad’ in 1895:

'The Cambridge Duad', Cambridge University, 1895 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Look closely at the eighteen-year-old at the front. He’s Charles Rolls, keen cyclist and founder (with Henry Royce) of Rolls-Royce.

Here he is again that year, this time on a more conventional two-seat tandem:

Rolls and Legard riding a tandem, Cambridge University, 1895 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

These wonderful pictures are from an album put together by Rolls that’s now in our Library and Archives collection, available to view by appointment at our Swindon site.

Half a century on, the technology seems barely to have changed. We’ve a handful of tandems in our historic bikes collection, including this lightweight touring model by Rensch from 1948:

Tandem bicycle, 1948 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

For Charles Rolls, though, history was to be cut tragically short. Besides his cycling and motoring, he was also a pioneering aviator. In 1910, at an air tournament at Bournemouth, Rolls was killed performing a complex aerial manoeuvre. He was just 32.

Last time, I related the sad story of the demise of HMS Trafalgar, who had her nuclear reactor shut down a few weeks ago prior to retirement.

In 1993, Trafalgar was affiliated with the north-west town of Lancaster, just across Morecambe Bay from Barrow-in-Furness where many naval submarines are built. Now the boat has been decommissioned, the affiliation has come to an end, and the tip of Morecambe’s Stone Jetty is to be renamed ‘Trafalgar Point’ in the boat’s honour.

Apparently, council officials had considered naming a plaza, rather than a jetty, but realised that there was already a rather more famous Trafalgar Square. This leads me neatly to some wonderfully atmospheric photos of the London landmark in the collection of the National Media Museum:

Trafalgar Square, c.1890 (NMeM / Science & Society)

London’s Trafalgar Square has been a traffic hot-spot for more than a century…

'Held Up, Trafalgar Square', 1923 (NMeM / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society)

…although the air quality has certainly improved since the early days.

Hansom cab in Trafalgar Square, c.1898 (NMeM / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society)

Trafalgar Square is often at the heart of demonstrations, marches and rallies. One event, held in the square in Easter 1966, was captured in another of the NMeM’s photographs: a march by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament…

CND Easter March, Trafalgar Square, 1966 (NMeM / Tony Ray-Jones / Science & Society)

Fifteen years later, the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine Trafalgar was launched…

The photographic collections of the National Media Museum (part of the National Museum of Science and Industry) are truly remarkable. You can explore some of their holdings here if you can’t visit in person.

Earlier, I told you about HMS Astute, the Royal Navy’s latest nuclear-powered submarine, due to be handed over by the builders later this year.

She’s the second naval submarine with that name, the first being launched in 1944 as part of the Amphion-class of boats. We’ve this model of HMS Amphion herself on show in our Shipping gallery:

Model of HMS 'Amphion', 1944 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Another boat in the series was HMS Alliance. To experience life on board a submarine, head for the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, where Alliance is open to the public. I had an excellent guided tour from a retired submariner on my last visit.

You can also climb on board the Royal Navy’s first ever submarine, ordered 110 years ago. The Holland 1, UK-built to American designs, has been fully restored and well worth a visit.

'Holland'-class submarine, 1901 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Visiting them really brings home how cramped life on board a submarine must be.

Sailors in a British submarine, 1914-18 (NMeM / Daily Herald Archive / Science & Society)

The latest nuclear boats are bigger, though, as they’ve plenty of power. The latest Astute will replace HMS Trafalgar, now retiring after more than a quarter-century of service. Her nuclear reactor produced enough electricity each year to power a town the size of Swindon.

Switching it off has been a real wrench for the crew. One engineer said, ‘it’s like putting your best friend to sleep – the lads have built up this fantastic machine, kept it going … suddenly, you’re ending all that.’

It may have felt sudden, but the boat will be crewed for many months yet – it takes a long time for a nuclear reactor to cool down after 26 years of fission!

A few months ago, I showed you two ship models on show in our maritime galleries, both called Savannah.

The 1818 version was the first steamship to cross an ocean (even though she did so mostly under sail power)…

Model of Paddle Ship 'Savannah', 1818 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

…while her 1959 namesake was the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship.

Model of Nuclear Ship 'Savannah', 1959 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The first nuclear ship was a naval submarine, USS Nautilus, launched in 1954, with British equivalents following a few years later, such as HMS Resolution.

Model of HMS 'Resolution' nuclear submarine, 1966 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The latest British nuclear boat, HMS Astute, is due to be handed over to the Royal Navy this year, with a nuclear reactor the size of a domestic dustbin and enough fuel to last for 25 years.

But warships and merchant craft are totally different beasts, not least crewing levels and maintenance infrastructure. The 1950s Savannah traded successfully for a while, but the economic conditions back then weren’t conducive to nuclear ships.

Now, though, the maritime industry is looking for ways to reduce emissions and fuel costs.

Nuclear might be one answer, and Lloyd’s Register (an organisation that sets standards and manages risk in the shipping industry) has recently been carrying out fresh research into nuclear-powered merchant ships.

There are plenty of problems to solve, but technically, it’s a mature industry. Savannah proved the concept of nuclear merchant ships in the 1960s. Only time will tell whether the industry is ready to return to them fifty years on.

It’s an interesting time to be a marine engineer…

All this talk recently about coastal navigation aids got me hunting through our pictorial collection, and I thought you might like to see this railway poster I found:

'Invest in a holiday at Deal', 1910s (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

Tsk tsk. I can’t imagine what Trinity House would have said about that. The woman’s clearly obscuring part of that buoy. Think of the risk to shipping! It’s an accident waiting to happen…

Deal, on the Kent coast, was an important port, a strategic site for shipping, and an ideal spot to erect a time ball to allow ships to check their chronometers as they passed through the English Channel. You can see the ball and its tower in this (rather more restrained) poster:

'Deal and Walmer', 1952 (NRM / Pictorial Collection / Science & Society)

The Deal time ball is still there, and when I visited a few years ago, it was still in operation, although the mechanism’s not original. It used to be triggered by an electrical signal from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which has the original time ball, put up in 1833.

More on maritime time signals another day…

Following my recent post about the Souter Point lighthouse in South Shields, Jack Kirby at Thinktank (the Birmingham science museum) mentioned the lighthouse optic they’ve got in their collection, from Longstone Lighthouse, off the Northumberland coast.

It’s by Chance Brothers, a Birmingham firm that specialised in precision optical technology such as lighthouse lenses, as well as being responsible for glazing the Crystal Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the dials of Big Ben.

Houses of Parliament (NMeM / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society)

As Jack pointed out, we’ve got a superb Chance Brothers lighthouse optic on show too – ours is from the Eilean Glas light on Scalpay in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. You can see it in Making the Modern World, and it’s on loan to us from the wonderful National Museums Scotland.

Eilean Glas lighthouse optic, 1907 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

These optical systems use the clever Fresnel lens system, in which the light is focused and directed by concentric rings of prisms. This makes them much lighter than one-piece lenses (though the glass in the Eilean Glas optic alone weighs three tons) and more powerful beams were made possible, saving lives at sea.

Bella Bathhurst’s book ‘The Lighthouse Stevensons’ tells the story of a remarkable family of engineers that designed lighthouses around the Scottish coast (including Eilean Glas), and is well worth a look.

Having talked about navigation at sea quite a bit recently, let’s turn to the tricky bit: the final approach to port. By now, the chronometer had done its job, your lunar-distance efforts had delivered you safely to within sight of land. From then on, you were on your own.

From the earliest days of mass sailing, coastal authorities such as Trinity House provided navigation aids, and one of the most iconic is the lighthouse. Their bright beams spell out danger, or guide ships through safe passages.

Early lighthouses used oil lamps, with reflectors behind to focus the light. But by the 1850s, developments with electric lighting looked promising. This was the era of the arc lamp, in which two carbon electrodes pass electricity across a tiny gap, causing a bright arc of spark.

Arc lamp from South Foreland lighthouse, 1867 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

The light was too bright for domestic living rooms, but perfect for lighthouses, and one of the first to be fitted with electric arc lighting was Souter Point lighthouse, situated just a short walk from my childhood home.

'Souter Point lighthouse', 1873 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

On installation in 1871, Souter’s light was one of the most powerful in the world, visible twenty miles out at sea.

'Souter Point lighthouse', 1873 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

It’s now been taken out of service and is run by the National Trust, and if you want to see the original electric generator (by Frederick Holmes), it’s on show in Making the Modern World, together with the Holmes arc lamp from the South Foreland lighthouse…

Holmes lighthouse generator, 1867 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

On Monday, I was part of the Science Museum’s Dana Centre event ‘Time and the Moon’, hosted by the BBC’s science correspondent, Pallab Ghosh. We had a full capacity crowd, which was terrific – thanks to everyone who came along. Hope you enjoyed it.

I spoke about how the Moon was used to navigate at sea, following pioneering work at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. From the late-eighteenth century, scenes like this one were played out on the decks of ships the world over, although I suspect real life was somewhat less tidy than this neat Victorian picture…

'Taking a Lunar Distance', 1891 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

This ‘lunar distance’ method of navigating involved measuring the Moon’s distance from certain stars, then carrying out some laborious arithmetic before getting a navigation fix. It took time and effort, but the ship’s crew depended on it for their lives.

The image is from an 1891 book in our library by Royal Observatory assistant, Edwin Dunkin, entitled ‘The Midnight Sky’. You can see more pictures from the book at our Ingenious website here.

'The Midnight Sky', 1891, by Edwin Dunkin (Science Museum / Science & Society)

If you’re interested in marine navigation before satnav, I can heartily recommend ‘The Quest for Longitude’, edited by William Andrewes. It’s an absorbing and richly-detailed read, and demonstrates just how ingenious navigators had to be in the age of sail and steam.

And if you’re free tomorrow evening (Thursday), there’s a stellar cast of speakers at our next free Dana Centre event, ‘Space… a real frontier?’ Book now!

Last week I showed you the Rolex wristwatch that went seven miles down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, in the Pacific Ocean, in 1960. Let’s stay with the nautical theme with this marine chronometer:

Patek Philippe quartz marine chronometer (David Rooney)

Chronometers, as I’ve said before, were the timekeeping devices carried on board every ship from about 1810 to the 1980s to help navigate. The Royal Observatory Greenwich is the place to go for the whole chronometer story, but we too have some rather nice ones in our Measuring Time gallery.

Science Museum 'Measuring Time' gallery (David Rooney)

Most ships navigate using GPS these days, but I know quite a few amateur and recreational sailors who still navigate with the chronometer method. They tend to use their wristwatch, because modern quartz watches keep time just fine for longitude purposes.

The chronometer I just showed you (by luxury Swiss watchmakers Patek Philippe, whose remarkable factory in Geneva I once had the pleasure of visiting) is one of a small number of quartz versions produced in the 1970s and 1980s. They were more accurate than their mechanical counterparts, but were often boxed to look similar. Their days were numbered, though, as GPS started to take off.

But the maritime world is getting increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of GPS to jamming. Last year, a major exercise off the coast of Tynemouth took place to demonstrate how many systems could be affected in the event of hostile GPS signal jamming. This parliamentary debate shows how worrying this is – definitely a story to watch.