Today we have a treat for fans of our Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic exhibition; a lovely little behind the scenes podcast about the Oramics machine! A B-Side to the main exhibition, if you will. Nick Street‘s documentary about the creation of the exhibition features many fascinating interviews with contemporary electronic musicians, colleagues of Daphne Oram, and the curators and conservators behind the exhibition. Bonus material from Nick’s interviews was used to create this podcast, which features Science Museum Conservator Dennis […]
Our sister museum, the National Media Museum unveiled the worlds earliest colour moving pictures ever made!
This post was written by Amy Charlton, a work placement student with the Research & Public History department from Sussex University’s MA Art History and Museum Curating. Where do you think you might find this object? Known in Britain by the trade name ‘Pedoscope’, this was a familiar object in shoe-shops of the mid 20th century. The machine produced an X-ray of the customer’s foot inside a shoe to ensure shoes fitted accurately, which both increased the wear-time of the shoe and with that, […]
We were joined recently in the Science Museum by renowned British inventor Trevor Bayliss, who was keen to visit the Make it in Great Britain exhibition.
Dr Corrinne Burns explains some new research that reveals that your genes are only a tiny part of what makes you, you.
Science-loving drawings by our visitors
After learning about the manufacturing process of bread during a bread baking course Pippa Murray got to thinking about what other mass produced products used in our day to day lives have evolved in order to save us time… Traditionally bread making is a lengthy process. Hours of kneading, proving and baking produce just one meagre loaf. It’s no wonder that so many of us choose to buy a loaf from the shops instead of making it ourselves! The invention of […]
From Keith Richards to Jordan, books about people’s lives fly off the shelves. But what if they looked like this….? Created from the Human Genome Project, these replica books (a printed version can be seen at the Wellcome Collection) show the sequence of 3 billion bases of DNA contained within a human cell. Who did […]
One of my favourite objects in the Oramics to Electronica exhibition is the TB-303. Marketed in the 1980s as a ‘base accompaniment’ for solo musicians it failed to impress. As a consequence TB-303s soon became available on the second hand market, where they were picked up by inventive DJs creating a new type of sound know as House in cities such as Detroit and Chicago. By pushing the TB-303 to its limits they found a unique ‘liquid’ sound that became […]
Would you expect to find human body parts in the Maths and Computing gallery? Bizarrely, you can find one half of Charles Babbage’s brain which was donated to the Hunterian Museum by his son Henry (the other half is still with the Hunterian). Many brains of ‘great men’ were kept in the 19th Century to […]
Exhibitors from our Make it in Great Britain exhibition talk about the experience so far
The third and final installment of Miranda Bud’s blogs… The Watson and Crick discovery of the DNA double helix is an iconic image of our scientific age. It is considered the milestone of contemporary genetics and is such an integrated part of our society that saying “it’s in my DNA” is a commonly used phrase by many people. Working with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin they unlocked the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century. It led to countless advances, solved […]