Category Archives: Engineering

First Time Out…second time around

Leave a reply

Katie Maggs, Curator of Medicine at the Science Museum, writes about the collaborative museums project, First Time Out. 

A while ago the Science Museum took part in a project called First Time Out – where museums put on display a ‘treasure’ from their stored collections that had never before been seen in public. Well we’re giving it a go again – but this time the project is larger than ever. Ten museums, from all over England, have paired up to swap objects from their collections, with the Science Museum partnering with the Discovery Museum in Newcastle (a great day out – go visit!).

We’ve chosen a rather splendid set of ten ivory mathematical puzzles that was made in China and exported to Britain in the mid-late 1800s.

Amongst the puzzles the set contains is a tangram. A sensation when introduced to Europe in 1817 - tangrams are made up of several pieces known as ‘tans’ that can be assembled to make different shapes – according to problems posed by a picture book.
Amongst the puzzles the set contains is a tangram. A sensation when introduced to Europe in 1817 – tangrams are made up of several pieces known as ‘tans’ that can be assembled to make different shapes.

 In July, all the museums are swapping objects with their partners. We’re very excited about the early light-bulb and light switch that will be heading down from the Discovery Museum.

Newcastle was a hotbed of activity during the development of electric lighting, with pioneers such as Joseph Swan based there. (Image courtesy of Discovery Museum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne).

It’s strange to think on the 4th July all ten objects will be hitting the road, crossing paths up and down the country, until they reach their temporary new home. And there’s some seriously amazing objects that have been uncovered. The bone model guillotine from Peterborough Museum, and the Natural History Museum’s tattooed dolphin skull are pretty remarkable.

Previously lurking in Peterborough Museum’s store is this model guillotine made from animal bone by prisoners of the Napoleanic Wars. (Credit: Photo John Moore, Vivacity Culture and Leisure)

I think it’s useful for museums to draw attention to material in store – both to explore the strangeness and explain the significance of holding material in storage for perpetuity, as well as to highlight the particular riches to be found behind the scenes.  Objects of course convey multiple meanings. Museums as well aren’t homogenous, so perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the project are the different perspectives each partner brings to the same object.

From a personal point of view, it’s been great working on First Time Out. Part of the fun was in selecting potential object candidates to be displayed, it was a great opportunity to look beyond the usual artefacts I work with (medical stuff) and explore collections I don’t usually get my hands on such as maths or astronomy colletions pictured here within Blythe House. (Credit: Laura Porter)

First Time Out opens with home objects on display from 6th June. You can see the Discovery Museum’s objects on display in the Museum from 5th July – until the beginning of August.

Unpacking bags of Science: Diamonds in the rough

Leave a reply

This post was written by Tara Knights, a work placement student with the Research & Public History department  from Sussex University’s MA Art History and Museum Curating.

This is the third installment in a series of blog posts where we have been exploring the lives of our ancestors by looking at a collection of tool bags from the Science Museum’s collections. This time we will be looking at the mining industry. We might think we’re fairly familiar with the tools of the mining trade, with the Davy lamp and pickaxe especially being mining icons. But do you know what kind of instruments mining engineers would use?

 

Mineralogical test kit (Science Museum)

Mining engineers played (and still play)  an important role in the consultation of almost every stage of a mining operation. They first analysed the potential of a mineral deposit, and then determined the profitability of a mine.

When the minerals had been successfully extracted, this mineralogical test kit was used to perform a mineralogical analysis in order to identify mineral species and understand their characteristics and properties. In order for a substance to be classified as a mineral it had to pass a series of tests, and this kit contains the tools needed for mineral testing, including a blowpipe, tweezers and chemicals.

The flame test indicated the identity of the substance being tested by the colour of the flame it produced. For example, a potassium compound burns with a lilac flame. Blowing through the blowpipe over a candle providing a heat source produced a tiny area of intense heat on a charcoal block, and created the right conditions for separating metals from their ores. After the process of mineralogical testing had taken place, this Tutton’s goniometer for cutting, grinding and polishing minerals may have been used. It was manufactured by Troughton and Simms, London c. 1894, and designed by Mr. A.E. Tutton.

 

Tutton’s goniometer (Science Museum)

 

‘Onward Ever’ – Sir Henry Bessemer 19.1.1813 – 15.3.1898

2 Replies

Sir Henry Bessemer, British inventor and engineer, 1880 ( Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library )

Sir Henry Bessemer’s motto summed him up – one who strived, faced and overcame obstacles to achieve a number of successes. These culminated in the invention of his process for the bulk production of steel in 1856. This development was to prove massively significant in the extension of the railways and in large construction.

Bessemer, born 200 years ago this month, sought the key process that would allow him to live in the lap of luxury.  His father, Anthony Bessemer, also a successful inventor, encouraged his son’s interest in things mechanical and gave him the freedom to explore his own ideas from the early age of 17.

Early in his career, Henry Bessemer made a fortune from his mechanised process for making bronze powder, previously made in a laborious manual process fiercely protected in Germany, and sold at a high premium. Bessemer took great steps to maintain secrecy, including employing his three brothers-in-law to oversee manufacturing.

Later, Bessemer applied himself assiduously to a method for producing good quality malleable iron in quantity, and eventually high quality steel. On 24 August 1856 he presented his method to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in a paper entitled “The Manufacture of Iron without fuel”.  Later he commented that he should have waited until the process was reliable. He had to overcome early problems with poor quality steel due to high quantities of phosphorus in the iron ore used – an issue later resolved by Sidney Thomas Gilchrist. Robert Mushet also offered improvements to the process by his numerous experiments to control the amount of carbon in iron ore. Although Bessemer rejected his claims, he agreed to pay Mushet an annual pension of £300 a year for an undisclosed reason – perhaps to avoid troublesome litigation.

Pilot Bessemer converter, 1865 ( Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library )

Despite the Bessemer process rapidly gaining international recognition, notably in France, Belgium and North America, Bessemer had a tougher time gaining in acceptance in Britain, in particular with the War Office and the Admiralty.

Never one to let a perceived injustice or lack of recognition go without a fight, in 1878 Bessemer wrote to the Times and to the entire cabinet, including the Prime Minster, Lord Beaconsfield, about his important role, in 1833, of inventing a way of stamping state documents that could not be open to fraud. His contribution was finally recognised with a knighthood conferred by Queen Victoria in 1879.

Bessemer and the Royal Family, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 1875 ( Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library )

As to his invention of the Bessemer process for bulk production of steel – it seems inevitable, understanding his character of steely determination combined with hard work, wide experience and enormous intellect, that he would be able to look at an area outside his direct area of expertise, approach it with an open mind, not be hidebound by received practice, and finally find a satisfactory solution which was to have a worldwide impact
.

Collecting synthetic biology – an iGEM of an idea

Leave a reply

Collecting stuff is generally the bit I like most about my job. That’s probably why I’ve got a bit over excited about the new acquisitions we’ve made related to synthetic biology – from no other than Tom Knight widely described as the “father” of the discipline.

Synthetic biology is research that combines biology and engineering. Sounds like genetic engineering by another name? Well yes, but it goes much further. It looks to create new biological functions not found in nature, designing them according to engineering principles.  Some see the field as the ultimate achievement of knowledge, citing the engineer-mantra of American physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot create, I do not understand”.

Biofilm made by the UT Austin / UCSF team for the 2004 Synthetic Biology competition. From drugs to biofuels the potential applications are huge. (Image: WikiCommons)

Now like a lot of biotech, synthetic biology isn’t particularly easy to collect or represent through objects – as it’s the biology that’s interesting and most of the ‘stuff’ used in research is entirely indistinguishable from other biological equipment e.g. micropipettes and microwells.  

What we’ve acquired are a number of iGEM kits – hardware consisting of standardised biological components known as BioBricks™ . Students competing in iGEM are sent these kits to engineer new applications. Check out some of the former winner’s projects: Arsenic Biodetector, Bactoblood, E. Chromi.

Biological lego – parts that have particular functions and can be readily assembled. The kits document a fascinating ten year period in the discipline of synthetic biology – starting from this basic aliquot kit sent out when iGEM first launched c.2002. (Image: Science Museum)

The origin of these objects and the idea for BioBricks™ is rather curious. They didn’t emerge from biology – but from computer science. Tom Knight was a senior researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Tom became interested in the potential for using biochemistry to overcome the impending limitations of computer transistors.

Knight Lab: Tom set up a biology lab in his computer science department and began to explore whether simple biological systems could be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells. That led to setting up iGEM.

From aliquots to paper based DNA to microwells – the kits show the technological change and sheer complexity of distributing biological components to teams competing around the globe.

In 2008 - the kits trialled paper embedded DNA via these folders - but it didn't quite work out. The kits do, however, represent an important ethic - that of open-sourcing in science. Students collaborate and contribute to adding new biological parts. (Image: Science Museum)

Suggestions for other synthetic biology stuff we could collect gratefully received!

In pursuit of power

Leave a reply

This article was written by Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering 

1712 was a red letter year for humankind: for the first time, rather than just relying on wind, water, or muscles, a new energy source became available: the steam engine.

Thomas Newcomen of Dartmouth took the earlier, and rather ineffective, steam pump by Thomas Savery, christened by him the ‘Miner’s Friend’, and expanded it up into a truly practical industrial machine that harnessed the power of the atmosphere. The first of Newcomen’s engines was erected near Dudley Castle in the Midlands, in 1712. Here, then, was the beginning of our mineral energy-intensive age.  

Thomas Barney’s 1719 engraving of the Newcomen engine erected near Dudley Castle ( Science Museum, London )

As the Science Museum expanded in the early twentieth century, the central role of steam meeting our energy needs placed the engine collection centre-stage: the first things visitors still see entering the museum are engines by James Watt, and other engineers.

The thing was, the museum long had a gap in its collections: there was no Newcomen-type engine to display. Curator HW Dickinson was asked to make good the deficiency. By the end of 1914, and mindful that agents for Henry Ford’s museum at Detroit were also snooping around, he had surveyed all the candidate engines.

The one chosen was that from Pentrich Colliery, Derbyshire. It was built by Francis Thompson in 1791, and used the original working cycle pioneered by Newcomen, although the engine was physically altered (and relocated) during its working life.

The Pentrich engine just before it was dismantled and shipped to the Science Museum ( Science Museum, London )

Dickinson oversaw the purchase, dismantling and re-erection of the 105 tons of iron, stone and timber comprising the engine and large portions of its engine house inside the Science Museum . It remains there today, symbolising the substitution of mineral for organic energy which Britain’s industrial revolution depended upon.

 

For an alternative view of the Newcomen engine why not check out the Science Museum’s Climate Changing Stories.

An interesting post about boring machines (for making tunnels)

6 Replies

Whenever I go to London by train I see the civil engineering works outside Paddington Station for the new Crossrail link. There is a big hole ready to take the giant German-made tunnelling machines which will soon start work boring the Crossrail  tunnels under London.

These amazing pieces of engineering are often scrapped after their job is done. They are far too large to fit in any museum, so we have a model of the similar machines used to bore the Channel Tunnel in the 1990s. 

However, at our Large Object store at Wroughton in Wiltshire we have one of their very much smaller ancestors, the Whitaker Tunnelling machine.

The Whittaker Tunnelling Machine (Credit: Peter Turvey)

Ours was built about 1922 and used for early Channel Tunnel exploratory work.

Like modern machines it has a revolving ‘cutter head’ at the front to chew through soil or soft rock, and is gradually inched forward as the tunnel is excavated.

Whitaker Tunnelling Machine - Cutting Head (Credit: Peter Turvey)

How it came to the Museum is a fascinating story. Abandoned for nearly 70 years outside the short tunnel it excavated near Dover, the machine was rescued in the 1990s, restored, and presented to us.

Yet there is a sombre side side to its history – the Whitaker Tunnelling machine was originally developed to drive tunnels under the German lines during the First World War, so that so that huge caches of explosives could be fired under them to break the stalemate on the Western Front.

The forthcoming anniversary of that destructive conflict reminds us how conflict is often a driver for technological change for good or ill.

Art at the coalface

Leave a reply

This is undoubtedly our most famous painting: Philip J. de Loutherbourg’s 1801 ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’, a noisome depiction of the industrial revolution in all its terrible glory.

P.J. de Loutherbourg, 'Coalbrookdale by Night', 1801 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

Here are the ‘Bedlam furnaces’ in action – open coke hearths used for smelting iron, the visible face of a burgeoning coal industry. But if we dig a little deeper, we find a rich and little-known iconographic seam in the Science Museum’s art collection.

For one thing, what de Loutherbourg saw at Coalbrookdale was not all fire and brimstone:

P.J. de Loutherbourg, 'Colebrook Dale' (engraved by William Pickett), 1805 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

In this engraving, done only a few years after ‘Coalbrookdale’, everything is reversed: night has become day, the horse returns, and the sublime power of the iron works has transformed into picturesque calm. This is in line with much 19th-century industrial art; in the 1840s, for example, W. Wheldon produced the following two oil-paintings of collieries:

W. Wheldon, 'North Eastern coalfield: colliery pit-head and coking ovens' and 'Colliery and wagonway, Northumberland and Durham coalfield', both 1845 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

Although he shows us the pollution at one colliery and the rough incursion into the landscape of the other, Wheldon’s pit-heads and coke ovens are undoubtedly clean and well organised, the elegant buildings perhaps even preferable to unruly Nature.

Attractive as these images are they don’t really tell us what life was like in the heart of the colliery, deep underground in the mines themselves. Such frank portrayals of the lives of miners are rare – it’s not easy to get access to a mine, much less to publicise its cruel machinations.

But amongst the Science Museum’s pictorial collections there is one such piece of documentary evidence: a remarkable set of amateur paintings, dating from the 1920s and ’30s, done by a miner called Gilbert Daykin. After each day at the pit Daykin would return home to paint from memory in his kitchen studio. Here is his 1934 ‘Thirst – The End of a Shift’, in which the deputy looks on dispassionately as one of his charges drinks from his 3-pint ‘Dudley’ flask:

Gilbert Daykin, 'The Dudley: Thirst - The End of a Shift', 1934 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

In all of his works Daykin shows the stoic miners, neither pitying nor lionizing them. Yet he was subtly polemical. Another 1934 painting is entitled ‘The Tub: At the end of the coalface’, and shows two men working in cramped conditions:

Gilbert Daykin, ''The Tub: At the End of the Coalface', 1934 (Science Museum/Science & Society)

The startling light and looming shadows create an impressive scene, an apt counterpart to de Loutherbourg’s grandiose ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’. But look closely and you’ll see that all is not well: the main crossbeam is cracking. The miner, his head touching the ceiling, is at risk of being crushed.

As Daykin said when interviewed for his exhibition: “I live in eternal dread of some injury to my eyes and hands. I am a specialist in dangerous jobs.” In 1939 Daykin was killed when the mineshaft he was working in collapsed.

A Royal Execution

2 Replies

My colleague Katie recently posted about the upcoming royal wedding. But of course, public events involving royalty have not always been so benign.

On January 21st 1793, ‘citizen’ Louis Capet – formerly Louis XVI of France – was taken by carriage to the Place de la Concorde (re-named Place de la Révolution at the time). Here, in front of a crowd of many thousands, the ex-king was beheaded. 

Medal depicting Louis XVI

Medal depicting King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, German, 1793 (Science Museum)

Although death at the hands of your people is about as low as it gets for a monarch, at least his departure was relatively swift. For just 9 months earlier the guillotine had been introduced to France. Previously, a king would probably have had his head removed with either a sword or axe – a messy business, even in experienced hands.

The development of this more reliable piece of execution technology had been instigated by Joseph Ignace Guillotin and fellow doctor, Antoine Louis. Not that it was the first automated method of decapitation. The Halifax Gibbet being one machine that preceded the guillotine by several centuries.

Guillotine blade

Guillotine blade, France, 1794 (Science Museum)

Ironically, given the guillotine’s role in the Reign of Terror that began in earnest later in 1793, Guillotin had seen it as a humane alternative to less reliable methods. As a fast-acting execution machine that wouldn’t fail and a step along the way to the end of the death penalty - a sentence that Guillotin actually opposed. As it was, the guillotine remained France’s official method of execution until capital punishment was abolished in 1981. 

Commemorative medal

Reverse of medal shown above, commemorating the executions of Louis XVI and his queen, German, 1793 (Science Museum)

Nine months after Louis, his wife Marie Antoinette, by then referred to simply as the ‘Widow Capet’ arrived at the Place de la Révolution in an open cart. In front of another large crowd, she too fell victim to ‘le rasoir national’ – France’s very efficient ‘national razor’.

James Watt’s family life

Leave a reply

To me the most touching item in James Watt’s workshop is his son’s trunk.

Gregory Watt's trunk

Gregory Watt's trunk (Science Museum)

Gregory died of consumption at only 27 years old. The trunk is full of his schoolwork; beautiful paintings, drawings, diagrams and page upon page of his lessons and notes, in immaculate copperplate writing.

It is a poignant reminder that the genius engineer was as human as the rest of us.

Quite apart from his own bad health, his first wife died in childbirth and only one of his 7 children (James) outlived him.

Yet despite such tragedies, plus the ups and downs of his business life, James Watt lived to the ripe old age of 83 – a ‘good innings’ even by today’s standards.

So perhaps it’s true – an active mind really is the secret to a long life!

An Artist in Search of Colour

2 Replies

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) was born in Germany and studied in Strasburg and Paris. He became artistic adviser at the Drury Lane Theatre from 1771-81.

As an innovative set designer and scene painter, he helped to lay the foundations of pictorial illusion in stagecraft. After abandoning theatre in the 1780s, he became an important figure in British landscape painting.

The Science Museum holds one of his most famous works, ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’, 1801. This epitomises the romantic view of the growth of industry in its formerly pastoral setting.

The development of coke smelting in Shropshire in the 18th century revolutionised the production of iron and helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.

Coalbrookdale by Night © Science Museum / Science & Society

In the Science Museum Archives there is a letter from De Loutherbourg to Matthew Boulton, James Watt’s business partner.

He was desperate to find an ingredient for one of his colours, yellow copperas. The letter says:

“I am a little at leasure at present, and wanting it very much, even for the Small Pictures, wich you was so kind as to ask me to do for you”.

And what a difference the colour makes.

Ironworks, Coalbrookdale, 1805 © Science Museum / Science & Society

Ironworks, Coalbrookdale 1805 © Science Museum / Science & Society