Stories from the stores

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.

I happened across this BBC news report about a stolen bus brought to a halt on the M1 motorway by a police stinger. If you want to see a stinger up close, you’d be better off visiting our Making the Modern World gallery and seeing the one we’ve got on display, rather than stealing a bus:

Metropolitan Police stinger (credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

Quite by chance, our stinger is on display right next to a piece of the M1 motorway:

Core sample of M1 motorway (credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

And to complete this very literal interpretation of the news story, while you’re in the gallery seeing the stinger and the bit of motorway, head up to the Models Walkway display. There’s a neat early model of a London General Omnibus Company ‘B’-type motor bus. Introduced in 1910, this was the first really reliable and commercially successful motor bus:

LGOC B-type motor omnibus (credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

Some say the B-type is the bus equivalent of the Ford Model T motor car, introduced two years before. There’s one of those in Making the Modern World, too…