Science Museum Group Journal

It is well known that throughout his long and brilliant career Trevor Pinch was a leading scholar in at least three research fields. In the sociology of scientific knowledge he was one of the most influential contributors, both alone and in collaboration with his mentor Harry Collins (see in particular Collins and Pinch, 1982; and Pinch 1985, 1986). He co-founded and developed the sociology of technology and the field of science and technology studies for which, in 2018, he was awarded the prestigious John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Later in his career, he was a core player in the field of sound studies (see for example Pinch and Bijsterveld (eds), 2003, 2004, 2012), to which he was led by his work on the Moog synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco, 2002) and his passionate love for music.

However, the work of Trevor Pinch, and in particular the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach that he developed with Wiebe Bijker (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), has also been influential for many other neighbouring research fields to which he contributed only indirectly or episodically. This is the case for organisational studies, for example, or for studies of innovation. It is also the case for media studies. In what follows, as a media scholar, I represent the intellectual debt of my field to the work of Trevor Pinch. To do so, I will first clarify the role played by SCOT in the disciplinary tradition of media studies, in particular in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century. I will then move my focus to lesser-known works by Trevor Pinch on mediated communication, which he sporadically addressed as part of his broader research interests (related, for example, to the practice of selling). My attempt will be to retrace the tenets of Pinch’s own take on media as they emerge both from these too rare interventions and from the methodological reflection he has dedicated to the topic. In my final remarks, I will draw on the two preceding sections to highlight some other possible points of crosspollination between the current field of media studies and Trevor Pinch’s work, that remain to be explored in depth.

This article examines two notebooks belonging to the scientific filmmaker F Percy Smith, labelled 'Data A' and 'Data B', which are held at the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford. These notebooks offer valuable insights into Smith's working process in the last two decades of his life-between 1925 and 1945-and they detail the wide array of materials, tools and equipment that he used to produce his films. The article suggests some of Smith's uses for the notebooks, such as noting down locations for collecting specimens or describing how to construct tanks and troughs for filming individual organisms. Using a wide range of supplementary sources, including images, videos and an interactive map, I argue that Smith's work amounted to a form of scientific 'craft', which blended across his experimentation with photographic media and scientific observation. Dismantling the long-held belief that F Percy Smith worked entirely alone, the article uses the notebooks as an opportunity to highlight for the first time the role that two women played in Smith's studio-laboratory: his wife, Kate Smith, and his assistant, Phyllis Bolté. The notebooks are a key source for understanding the production of natural history films of the interwar period, including the popular Secrets of Nature (1922-1933) series. The article reflects on what media scholars can learn from taking a closer look at the materials and methods used for making films of this kind.

Like the contributions to the other papers in this collection (‘Object itineraries’ and ‘Instrumental networks’), those in this final section explore instrumental networks and object itineraries in order to tell new histories of observatory sites and their associated networks. (For a discussion of the genesis and thinking behind the collection of papers see the ‘Introduction’). Here, however, they focus on object stories that highlight the opportunities for and importance of communicating with those outside the scientific community. They show, however, a wide range of potential and actual audiences to be mediated between, from closely associated scientific institutions and those holding the purse strings within government, to groups making up the local civic society and a wider and more diffuse audience for scientific outputs and achievements. The objects explored here are an 1850s model of electrically triggered time signals, associated with those at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh; a late nineteenth-century astrographic telescope that, with approval of scientific and governmental audiences, brought the National Astronomical Observatory of Mexico into an international project and subsequently found new audiences through public display and artistic intervention; and a photoelectric relay that advertised the Yerkes Observatory to the Chicago and visiting public by forming part of a stunt, whereby the light of a distant star triggered the lighting of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.

In this paper, each contribution uses an object biography – or object itinerary – methodology, tracking their chosen objects from conception and purchase, across time and space, to today. The function of each object could change significantly over time, and these stories serve to remind us of the range of projects and activities that observatories might support or host, including overseas astronomical expeditions, a local time service, mathematical calculations, measurement of photographic plates, magnetic, meteorological and seismological observation, the hosting and dining of visitors, and the display and promotion of the observatory’s status. In each case, the object’s movements and location within particular spaces point the reader to consider a wide range of people, whether located within the observatory, beyond its walls, or within international scientific networks. The objects considered here are a London-made marine chronometer purchased by the Palermo Observatory, which was not used for navigation but was nevertheless well travelled; a large wooden table placed in the Octagon Room of the Royal Observatory Greenwich; and a British seismograph set up in at the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory of the University of Coimbra. These itineraries also show how the value attached to objects changes over time: they shift from functional tools to obsolescence, then regain significance as their histories have been recovered and re-examined. This paper forms part of the collection ‘Revealing observatory networks through object stories’ where object stories are presented in three themed papers (with further papers being ‘Instrumental networks’ and ‘Observatory audiences’). The genesis of the collection is described in the ‘Introduction’.

This paper introduces a group of three articles that bring together object stories relating to observatory history and networks. The three articles (‘Instrumental networks’, ‘Object itineraries’ and ‘Observatory audiences’) each bring together three object stories by different authors that contribute to the article theme. Here the genesis of the collection at the workshops of the Observatory Sites and Networks project is discussed, along with the approaches taken and the kind of insights that studies of material culture can shed on histories of observatories and the observatory sciences. The arrangement of the stories into three themes is outlined while common threads and recurring motifs that create connections and synergies across the thematic sections are highlighted. Together the collected papers make an argument for the use of objects in research, demonstrating the fruitfulness of investigating their histories and showing how they can expand our understanding of the networks of people, organisations and objects that were interested in or essential to the successful functioning of observatories. They also demonstrate the breadth and variety of interests and resources that were drawn into these networks, offering new ways of understanding and interpreting both observatory sites and museum objects.

This paper presents three pieces that use objects, or object types, to reveal the material, personal, institutional and commercial networks that surrounded the introduction and successful use of instruments, systems and techniques. The objects explored are: the Hourly Signal Relay, used within the time signal system of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, from the mid-nineteenth century; photographic glass plates from the British 1874 transit of Venus expeditions; and an electronic imaging tube, Lallemand's camera, developed in Paris and used at the Lick Observatory in California in the 1960s. Each story uses examples of failure as a means of highlighting a lack of robustness in or effort required to maintain these networks. Once created, however, such networks could, as the second two stories note, go on to develop and support alternative approaches, helping to create success from apparent failure. Nevertheless, complexity, failure and fragility have also led to the underrepresentation or obscurity of these objects in museum collections, until given focused attention in these studies. The paper forms part of a collection of articles: Revealing observatory networks through object stories. The other papers in the collection are 'Object itineraries', and 'Observatory audiences' and the genesis of the collection is discussed in the 'Introduction'.

Industrial improvements to silver plating through the work of electroplating firms such as Elkington, Mason and Co are an important part of our industrial heritage, bridging art, science and industry to form a significant portion of museum collections. However, the impact of this development of silverplating technology upon photography has not previously been explored. This article details the improvements that electroplated silver brought to the daguerreotype photographic process and to the manufacture of daguerreotype plates in Birmingham, offering a material reappraisal of the inventive qualities of the daguerreotype within a wider narrative of industrial manufacture.

Chemists in 1840s Birmingham were developing photographic techniques and silverplating processes at the Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, later Queens College on Paradise Street. These scientists – George Shaw (1818–1904) and John Percy (1817–1889) – had detailed, tactile knowledge of the convergent chemistry and processes in both arenas. Developments in the industrial manufacture of silverplate in 1840s Birmingham created significant improvements to the materials used in the daguerreotype photographic process, making photography more viable as a commercial venture. Shaw planned an early portrait studio and worked with early innovators in electroplating techniques the Marrian brothers (Francis (1802–1893) and Benjamin James Pratt Marrian (1811–1891)) using magneto-plate technology developed by another Birmingham industrial entrepreneur John Woolrich (c. 1791–1843). This potential studio did not emerge due to restrictive patenting and licensing restrictions around the practice of daguerreotype photography, yet extant daguerreotypes tell a story of improvements stemming from technical innovation. These daguerreotypes situate industrial Birmingham as a place of innovation and invention and place the daguerreotype photographic process within narratives of industrial improvements and radically inventive manufacturing practices.

Key to the analysis presented here is the role of the recreation of historic techniques in historical research and the value of acquiring tactile knowledge of the behaviour of materials during the processes explored. Here practical experiments allowed the author to look beyond the surviving daguerreotypes via material knowledge to the circumstances and social environment of production. This approach revealed new knowledge which offers an alternative reading of the history of objects through their materials.

As a nationalised industry during the Cold War, Britain's railways were required to undertake civil defence work to prepare for a future conflict. Civil engineers that engaged with civil defence work were required to understand the destructive capacity of first atomic and later hydrogen weapons as well as the threats of nuclear fallout and radiation so that they could design and build structures capable of withstanding them. At first, these civil engineers objected as the work was beyond their expertise. But from 1952 onwards, each region of Britain's railways, led by their civil engineering departments, began to build infrastructure and train their staff to prepare for the continued functioning of the railways following a nuclear attack. The central focus of railway civil defence changed as the bomb threat itself evolved, but its central purpose was always more focused on repair work and the assistance of military operations over civilian evacuations. However, shackled to guidance and limited available funding from the UK's Ministry of Transport and the Home Office, planning was frequently delayed or scaled back. By the mid-1960s, alongside most other British civil defence programmes, the planning was abandoned and government funding withdrawn. But despite the myriad of setbacks and funding disappointments, those that undertook the railways' civil defence planning and training during the early Cold War saw the value in their work and hoped to contribute to a national effort to survive and rebuild should the worst ever occur.

Some historians of the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ exhibited in 1876 interpret its principal significance as catalysing the eventual transformation of science collections in the (South) Kensington Museum into London’s present-day Science Museum. Debates about that nexus have not, however, noted that this exhibition was an international crowd-sourced venture in public science. Far from being collection-founding donations, most artefacts displayed were discretionary loans contributed by private citizens, learned societies, instrument makers, universities, engineering companies and state departments from across both the UK and Europe, with most displayed items later returned to their exhibitors. Our paper draws upon the art historiography literature of ‘loan exhibitions’ to consider the 1876 exhibit in (mostly) physical science as part of a growing democratic tradition of resource sharing. This exhibitor-focused approach is illustrated via case studies of two kinds of contributors that did not predominantly have their loans converted to donations: (male) instrument makers and women, especially widows. In that context, we can interpret apparatus lending in 1876 as forms of advertising, memorialising, and just occasionally offloading disused but historically important equipment. It is in such terms that we can better understand why only a small fraction of loaned 1876 apparatus become permanent parts of the South Kensington science collections via such means as state departments discarding obsolete technical equipment.

This essay briefly surveys the rich benefits a project like the Congruence Engine offers to national textile collections. Digital technology provides the means to bring dispersed material, written, and oral collections together into one space. However, it also has limitations, and the following will touch upon these. We finish with an overview of themes such a project should engage with and conclude with a mini study of the pre-Samuel Greg (Quarry Bank Mill) family context and how this links the Mill, the collections held at the Northern Ireland Record Office, and West Indian plantations together.

Negative pressure ventilators (NPVs) were used from the 1930s to keep patients with chest paralysis alive and they remained in use during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time paralysis was most commonly associated with poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). The most frequently used ventilators in the UK were the Both type, which were made of plywood to make them more cost effective. Despite their materiality, these wooden ventilators were, and are still, more commonly known as 'iron lungs'. By considering the uses of the metaphor 'iron lung' prior to the invention of the NPV, I will argue that 'iron lung' became eponymous as it connected the material reality of the NPV with imagined sensory experiences for publics in the UK, though often in ways that contradicted earlier metaphors of modernity and sound.

The history of the use of computer and data driven technologies by the railways is largely unknown and is very much overshadowed by a deep fascination with the steam railway. However, it was a willingness to embrace and develop these technologies that laid the foundations for the railway that we have today. This paper aims to show the history of the railway's 'long engagement' with these forms of communication and control technologies. This history forms the background to the increasing adoption of internet-based technology on today's railway, and thus provides a thread connecting the past, present and future of the rail system. A central argument here is that railway management of necessity focuses on control to ensure the safe operation and efficient running of trains and the management of a large and scattered workforce.[1] Control of revenue and costs, including wages and pensions,[2] as well as control of trains on heavily used lines, generated the need for control of data from an early stage. Consequently, UK railways were pioneer adopters of a succession of control technologies including the electric telegraph, 'Hollerith' tabulating machines and digital computers.

The Science Museum collects artifacts, not organisms. This rule has applied in the Museum ever since its foundation; but in 1989 the rule was apparently broken by our Department of Physical Sciences, which acquired two mice for its permanent collections. The mice in question were freeze-dried transgenic mice, direct descendants of the first mammals to be granted a US patent. The Department of Physical Sciences curator who had committed this transgression was Robert Bud. The addition of the ‘oncomice’ to the Science Museum’s collections nicely sums up aspects of Robert’s career: active contemporary science collecting, notably in biomedicine; exploring the role of artefacts as storytellers; and, of course, the (often gleeful) stretching of institutional conventions to explore new avenues in museum research and display. In this essay I will consider some challenges of collecting contemporary artefacts, and question whether such artefacts actually offer any greater challenges for museum storytelling than those from earlier periods.[2] I will also discuss some opportunities of contemporary collecting, many of which have yet to be fully harnessed by science and technology museums.

What do our museums do for us? The publ ic i s long fami l iar with museums as spaces of preservation, education and inspiration – where histories are cared for, learning is ignited and days out are enjoyed (Bri ta inThinks , 2013, p 3). Few would dispute these roles , but should museums be having an impact on broader concerns in our l ives? The last decade has seen a shi ft in the sector towards a more active role in wider society, something Manchester Art Gal lery’s director, Al is ta ir Hudson (2017), captured:

A wooden shield, made by a once-known Aboriginal person in Western Australia around the beginning of the twentieth century, sits in the Science Museum's London stores. This paper focuses on its life in an East London match factory from about 1928 until 1937, when it was transferred to the Science Museum. The shield stands out among its Aboriginal counterparts now held by museums because curators at the Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances (and subsequently at the Science Museum) did not prioritise its links with conflict or ceremony, nor the skill with which it was carved. Instead, unprepossessing marks on its back captured their attention. These saw-marks showed that this was not 'just' a shield: it had sometimes been used to make fire. Valued now as an example of global fire-equipment, it was subsumed into an English collection of fire making technologies. By tracing the shield's early museum life, this paper considers how and why European collecting cultures have marshalled indigenous objects to promote narratives of supposed 'progress'.

Organisational change in UK government research establishments (GREs) during the late twentieth century profoundly affected the scientific civil servants who worked in them. Civil service reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the reconfiguration of career management frameworks, alterations to physical working environments, the introduction of new management practices and an increasingly commercial outlook in GREs, yet we know very little about the how these changes were experienced by the scientists themselves. A new series of oral history interviews with former scientific civil servants offers the personal perspective of everyday working life in a GRE. Through extensive use of interviewees' own words this article reveals the norms and values associated with working in the scientific civil service and articulates the processes of organisational change that led to a fundamental shift in how government scientists felt about their work. In so doing it offers a record of a type of scientific working life in the UK that has largely disappeared as a consequence of bureaucratic reform and commercialisation.

This essay was delivered as a keynote presentation by Professor Prasannan Parthasarathi at a conference, Historical Threads, held at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum in November 2022. Up to that point, many of us in the audience had probably felt reasonably knowledgeable about the role of cotton production in the growth of Manchester and in what we call the Industrial Revolution. This essay was a revelation, presenting an entirely new, global perspective on the long history of international cotton trading, and positioning Manchester’s growth as a competitive response to what had for centuries been an Indian success story; one that was swiftly rewritten by nineteenth century British historians and industrialists.

This museum has for over thirty years featured a much-loved Textiles Gallery, highlighting regional innovations, such as Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and the global and social impact of industrialisation and mass production methods developed in and around Manchester. But we have never told the story that is told in this essay, nor properly framed Manchester’s growth within a world context. The museum, as part of the Science Museum Group, is now committed to presenting more inclusive narratives, developing displays to feature previously untold stories and provide global perspectives. There are few more painful or problematic histories than that of the cotton trade, and this conference was a first step towards creating a ‘Cottonopolis’ gallery, which will set Manchester’s textile history in a bigger, harsher yet ultimately richer context. This essay is a first step towards that retelling.

Note: Professor Parthasarathi is the first in a series of keynote speakers who will be invited to give presentations on subjects crucial to the Group’s major projects or research themes and whose lectures will be published in the Science Museum Group Journal.

Note: Professor Parthasarathi is the first in a series of keynote speakers who will be invited to give presentations on subjects crucial to the Group’s major projects or research themes and whose lectures will be made available online and published in the Science Museum Group Journal.

The presentation of electronic musical instruments in museum and other institutional contexts prompts a number of questions about the restoration of sound technologies, the reconstruction of musical practices and techniques, and past and present cultures of electronic music, among other topics. Drawing from research into the electronic musical instrument company and sound studio EMS London Ltd, which produced synthesizers and other devices during the 1970s, this paper outlines some examples of how an EMS synthesizer, the Synthi 100, has been restored and represented by academic, broadcasting and arts institutions in the last decade. Devised for compositional use in electronic music studios, in recent years the Synthi 100 has been used in concerts and broadcast media as an instrument for live performance. Focusing on some of these events, I ask how live performance is used to draw connections between electronic music's past and present, as well as to attract new participants and audiences to concerts, exhibitions and broadcasts of electronic music.

Experiences during the early years shape our lives as adults, including our appreciation and understanding of science. Even though early years audiences make up a significant number of visitors in many museums, they are an under-researched age group, particularly in science museums. This paper addresses this gap by considering young children’s learning at the Science Museum in London. Two approaches to support learning from unfamiliar objects were tested with 4–7 year-olds in family groups. The first approach involved families creating a display that featured a small replica of the original object. The second approach involved displaying familiar objects or modern versions with conversation prompts next to the original objects. The testing included observations and semi-structured interviews with a total of 16 family groups. Findings show that families use play to create familiarity and context around objects. Guided play provides opportunities for families to tap into their existing understanding and interests, and in this way allows families to learn from objects. These findings highlight the importance of providing for and encouraging play on gallery to support young children’s learning from objects. Young children can successfully be supported to learn from unfamiliar objects in object-rich galleries in a science museum.