Stories from the stores

Stories From The Stores is one year old today. Woo hoo!

Over the past twelve months, we’ve told 200 stories about science, technology, engineering and medicine as captured in our remarkable collections of objects, pictures, books and archives.

Our history – your history and mine – is embedded in the objects we’ve invented, made and used. Time flies, and we might forget this history if we didn’t collect stuff. Here, for instance, is a state-of-the-art aircraft flight exactly a century ago:

'Mr Gibbs Making an Evening Flight', July 1910 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Wonderful image – and worth remembering if you’re jetting off for a foreign holiday this summer. We’ve come a long way in a short time.

Here’s to the coming year – lots more stories from the Science Museum stores!

Reproduction of Philo's apparatus for indicating temperature change (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Philo explained:  

I assert that when the globe is placed in the sun and becomes warm, some of the air enclosed in the tube will pass out … into the water, setting it in motion and producing air bubbles, one after the other. If the globe be placed in the shade … then the water will rise through the tube and flow into the globe. 

Some seventeen or so centuries later Philo’s idea was revisited, leading to the invention of the air thermoscope. The Italian physician Santorio Santorio was one of several Europeans working on it simultaneously.

The two pieces of string tied round this air thermoscope indicate a rise in temperature. From Sanctorii Sanctorii, ... Ars de statica medicina, etc., 1625 (Wellcome Library, London)

Santorio’s instrument is in two parts. The glass bulb and tube are heated to expel some air, and the end of the tube is inverted into the narrow vessel containing water. As the air inside the bulb cools it contracts, drawing liquid up into the tube.  Once it has been set up, the changing water level indicates rising and falling temperature.

Santorio later put a scale on the thermoscope, creating the first air thermometer.  The air thermometer was supplanted by the more familiar liquid-in-glass thermometer from the 1640s. More on that another time. 

Combined thermometer and alcohol barometer, 1719 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

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.

The V2 rocket engine was the first ballistic missile, built by the Nazis to fire missiles at London, but that wasn’t the only part it had to play in history.

V2 Rocket

It could travel at three times the speed of sound and was the first man-made object that had the capability to reach space.

On the 16 July, 1969 the Apollo 11 mission allowed the first men to walk on the moon. The Saturn V rockets which took up each of the Apollo craft used six J2 engines – developed from the V2 by some of the designers that worked on the V2.

Apollo 10

So how did Wernher von Braun, the designer of a powerful German weapon then design the engine that helped America land on the moon?

As World War II was ending, Von Braun surrendered to American troops. Von Braun and his team were moved to Fort Bliss, Texas, under the top secret Operation Paperclip.

The V2 was chosen as one of our centenary icons, because it launched us into space. But as the power behind the first long-range missiles, it also threatened to destroy our world. An engine of war and discovery, these rockets have a legacy that still looms over us today. You can see them both in our Exploring Space gallery.

V2 and J2 engine

It’s ten years this week since the XMM-Newton space observatory launched. The biggest scientific satellite ever built in Europe, it has studied black holes, tracked how chemical elements are scattered in supernova explosions, and revealed that Mars’s atmosphere is bigger than previously thought.

XMM stands for X-ray Multi Mirror (the Newton bit is in honour of a certain Sir Isaac). X-rays can pass right through ordinary mirrors, so each of XMM’s three telescopes contains 58 cylindrical gold-plated mirrors nested together. Incoming X-rays skim the inside of the mirrors, a bit like stones skimming off water, and come to a focus at the telescope’s detector. You can see what one of the mirrors looks like in our Cosmos & Culture exhibition.

XMM-Newton grazing mirror (Credit: Science Museum)

Cosmos & Culture also has a whole X-ray telescope on display. The Joint European X-Ray Telescope (JET-X) is the largest telescope ever constructed in Britain. Unfortunately for the project team at the University of Leicester, the Soviet-led mission it was part of was cancelled after the USSR collapsed. But it’s fortunate for us, as it means we get to display a rare example of a real space telescope. Most of the space hardware you see in museums is prototypes or spares (like the XMM mirror), as the real thing is either waaaaaaaay up there, or has burned up on re-entry.

A view of JET-X from the Making the Modern World gallery. The project engineer reckons this is the highest the telescope has ever got above sea level. (Credit: Science Museum)

An example of a real space telescope that actually made it into orbit is the Spacelab 2 XRT (it stands for X-ray telescope, funnily enough). It flew on the Shuttle in 1985 and imaged the centre of our galaxy. XRT was in a pretty sorry state when we acquired it in 2005, as it had been dismanted and stored in a university building for years. The building was due for demolition so we had to collect XRT quickly before it ended up in a skip. We reunited the four members of the original University of Birmingham team at our Wroughton store. Working with our conservation team over several weeks they painstakingly pieced it back together, with only a few missing parts having to be re-made.

Spacelab 2 XRT in Exploring Space gallery (Credit: Science Museum)

XRT now stands proudly in the centre of our Exploring Space gallery. It looks as it would sticking out of the Shuttle’s cargo bay, except that we haven’t put most of the white thermal blankets on so that you can see it better. The blankets also made it look a bit like a pair of giant space trousers…

This Saturday (24 October), we’re launching our Cosmic Collections website ‘mash-up’ competition. Just in case anyone else is as baffled as me, I asked our Lead Web Developer, Mia Ridge, a few questions about the competition.

For the non-geeks out there, what’s a mash-up?

A mashup is a website or application that combines separate data sources and/or visualisation tools into a single integrated interface.

A really useful example is moveflat – you can search for housing by bus route or on a map of London.  The site mashes up data provided in housing ads with StreetMap and GoogleMaps so that the interface just works for the site visitor.

Why did you decide to run a mash-up competition for Cosmos & Culture?The idea of a mashup just seemed a perfect match for this exhibition.

Over the past few years there’s been a lot of discussion in cultural heritage technology forums about the need for APIs (instructions and methods for computers to request content and functions from each other) in museums. Some museums have released APIs, but it’s been difficult to find out how much real demand there is from non-museum programmers – I thought this would be one way to find out.

A comparatively small budget for web work in the original project meant we risked producing a bland museum microsite that might not do the objects and their stories justice.  There are so many ways of looking at these objects – as pieces of industrial design, as examples of the way we tell stories about the night sky, as artefacts from the history of science and technology, as personal items belonging to explorers and innovators, as beautiful objects in their own right… opening up the data to let people create their own sites seemed like a good way to enable other people to show us the collections as they see them.

A page from Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus celestium orbium

I knew there was an active online astronomy community, and that sites like Galaxy Zoo had ‘crowdsourced’ the classifications of galaxies, leading to some new discoveries.  One of the key messages of the exhibition was that amateur astronomers can still make important contributions, and that seemed to be a good match with the idea of encouraging people use our data in their own research.

Converting some of our web budget into prize money seemed like a concrete way of recognising the contributions and work of people working with our content.

How ground-breaking is it for a museum?

As far as I know, we’re the first museum to run a competition to crowd-source the creation of an exhibition site like this.

A few museums have produced APIs or published other ways to programmatically access their data and there have been lots of mashup competitions and hack days in the private and public sector but the combination is new. I’m very lucky – when I approached the curator with my idea, she could have thought I was being just a bit too experimental, but she decided to give it a go.

Good question!  I have absolutely no idea – which is both exciting and scary. Typically, mashups might use timelines or maps, but there’s some amazing visualisation work going on and tools like IBM’s Many Eyes make them really easy.

I’m hoping that the final submission date won’t be the end of it – we’d like to help build a community of developers who are interested in working with museum content. I’ll also be using the competition to work out how we can improve our collections API, and as input to on-going experiments with our online collections. I’m taking the approach of small experiments and iterative development that I can fit in around bigger project deadlines, partly because it’s a good match for the available resources and partly to test the benefits of a more agile approach.

If you have more questions for Mia please post them as comments below. To find out more about the exhibition and the objects on display check out our earlier interview with Ali Boyle, Curator of Astronomy.

What have you always wanted to ask a curator?

You might have a question about the Science Museum’s exhibitions or galleries, about our collections, library and archives, or more general questions about life in a museum.

Leave a comment and we’ll try to find the answer for you.

We’re experimenting with a blog to more quickly and easily tell stories about the Science Museum’s collections. It’s a work in progress – we’re trying new ways of sharing all the things we find out about the collections during our research.

We’d love to know what you think, and will try to answer any questions in your comments as quickly as possible.