I was in Southampton last week to give a talk, and while I was there, I dropped by the Southampton Maritime Museum to find out all about the area’s history as a passenger port. Outside, I was faced with a view that brought Southampton’s maritime past right up to the present. A couple of hours earlier, P&O’s latest cruise ship, Azura, had docked nearby, ready for its inaugural cruise. P&O was founded in 1840 as the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, operating freight and […]
The recent sunny spells have got me thinking about some of my favourite objects in the meteorology collection – sunshine recorders. John Francis Campbell (1821-1885), of the Hebridean island of Islay, designed the apparatus pictured above. You may be able to figure out how it works just from looking at it… The idea is that the glass ball acts as a lens, focusing the sun’s rays onto an area within the wooden cup and scorching it. As the sun travels from east to […]
Caroline Herschel was the first professional female astronomer. We explore more about her immense contributions to astronomy.
I recently mentioned our Stephenson’s Rocket reproduction steam train rides in Hyde Park this Easter. Have you had a go yet, if you’re close by? I can tell you first-hand that it’s great fun! Once you’ve experienced the live reproduction, you’ll naturally want to see the real thing in our Making the Modern World gallery. We’ve had Stephenson’s Rocket on show here in the Science Museum non-stop since 1862, apart from a couple of excursions to York and Japan. It’s […]
Some of us might have consumed rather too much chocolate this weekend. A walk is a good idea, but if even the gentlest of exercise makes you shudder, why not let beasts of burden take the strain? This child had the right idea: get a lift from a pair of prize-winning horses… They had taken part in the 1933 Easter Monday Van Horse Parade through London’s Regent’s Park. This parade, which at its height attracted over 1,200 animals, was founded in 1904 and […]
Many of you will doubtless have plans to get away this Easter (weather permitting). If you’re off, I hope you have a great break. Back in the 1920s, more and more people were getting paid time off, and leisure recreation was booming. Railway companies offered special cheap tickets for the Easter getaway. This 1928 poster, from Manchester’s Victoria Station, advertised excursions to destinations across the country. Sightseers could visit a wide range of resorts, from the rural idyll of Lake Windermere… to […]
Science Museum curators seem to have a curious affinity for tunnels. Stewart’s been down a sewer, David ventured under the Thames, and I’ve just been to one of the biggest tunnels in the world, a 27km ring under Switzerland and France. Yes, it’s the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Unlike my colleagues I didn’t get to enter this tunnel – that would be a bit inconvenient right now, as on Tuesday the LHC commenced physics operations, colliding beams of protons […]
No sooner do I write a blog about the symbolism of Waterloo’s station clock than it gets taken out of service for a refurbishment! The concourse underneath the Waterloo clock has become an iconic meeting-place, a focal point amidst the hurry of the station, as shown in Terence Cuneo’s dramatic painting: Now, for a few weeks, time stands still for the station’s passengers. Railways run on time. In the early days, time was a life-saver – literally – as trains […]
So, what’s the connection between contact lenses and rocket engines? The answer, I probably don’t hear you cry, is hydrogen peroxide and cleanliness. You see, to clean my newly acquired contacts involves bathing them overnight in a solution of hydrogen peroxide. Peroxide is a pretty powerful chemical agent and disinfects the lenses in 6 hours. If you put your lenses in too soon the still active chemical will turn on your eyeballs and cause them to gush tears like Gordon Ramsay’s […]
It looks like spring is finally here. About time too, after the coldest UK winter for over 30 years. The figures are in, and this year the mean temperature for 1 December – 24 February was just 1.51 °C, compared to a long-term average of 3.7 °C. But if you think that’s bad, cast your mind back to The Big Freeze of 1962/63, when parts of Wales and the South West were buried under snowdrifts six metres high, the Thames froze, and over 400 Football League and […]
An article in the Guardian last week reported that the tens of thousands of autorickshaws on the streets of India’s capital city, New Delhi, might be phased out, replaced (perhaps) by electric vehicles. I mentioned autorickshaws a while ago. We have a very nice example, by major Indian maker Bajaj, in our store at Wroughton: These vehicles have a long history, being based on motor scooters introduced by makers such as Piaggio in the 1940s and 50s. This scene on our Making […]
Lots of talk about the budget this week – and science funding is still uncertain. But as these examples from our Cosmos & Culture exhibition show, astronomers have always had to rely on a combination of persuasion, impressive results and skilled PR to keep their work funded. Tycho Brahe’s observations of the ‘new star’ of 1572 (a supernova explosion) impressed the Danish King Frederick II. He subsidised Tycho’s research by building the finest astronomical observatory of the times. The next King stopped the subsidy, so […]