Did anyone catch ‘Britain’s Greatest Machines’ on Five last Thursday? Chris Barrie is presenting a series looking at the evolution of engineering in Britain, directed by science documentarist Martin Gorst.
Much of what was talked about in the first episode, covering the 1910s, is represented (as you might expect) in the Science Museum’s collections. Back then we’d just become a fledgling museum in our own right and we were hungry to collect the very latest machines and inventions.
In the show, you see a Morgan three-wheeled cycle-car. At our store in Wroughton we’ve got this rather lovely 1914 model…
Chris Barrie watched a replica of the Vickers ‘Vimy’ that crossed the Atlantic in 1919 with John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. See the original in our Flight gallery…
And in our Making the Modern World gallery you can see a First-World-War Vickers machine gun like the one in the programme, alongside a model of a British Mark IV tank from 1917.
There are lots more than I can fit in here so why not watch the first episode on Demand Five here and then pop down to the Museum to see what you spot.
And if you want to find out more about the story of the Museum, we’ve just launched a new book, Science For The Nation: Perspectives on the History of the Science Museum. A remarkable institution – and an extraordinary century of machines.