Stories from the stores

Ask a Curator – Artificial arms

August 31st, 2010 | by | medicine, meta, your questions

Aug
31

As a warm up for Ask a Curator day tomorrow, I thought I would give you an in-depth look at one of our objects that has been generating a lot of comments on Twitter.

Artificial arm, 1850-1910 (A602817, Science Museum, London)

You may remember a post by my colleague, Stewart, on Arms, legs and ex-Servicemen showing our 20th century collection of prosthetic limbs. The history of artificial limbs is inseparable from the history of amputations and closely linked to warfare. 

This artificial arm was made for someone who had their left arm amputated above the elbow. Many people have commented on how sinister and robotic the arm looks. This is probably because you can see all of the joints in each of the fingers and the wrist. Unlike some modern prosthetics no attempt has been made to replicate the appearance of a hand, just its function - each of the fingers have some movement, the wrist and elbow rotate and move up and down.

A great deal of craftsmanship has gone into the arm. By the beginning of the 1800s, specialist prosthetic makers took over the jobs of making them from carpenters, blacksmiths and armour makers. Some prosthetic limb makers originating in the 1850s such as Hanger and Chas A. Blatchford are still in business today.

Aritfical arm by Chas A Blatchford, 1943 (1999-547, Science Museum, London)

If you want to see the sinister looking arm, it is on display at Medicine Man at the Wellcome Trust. There are also a number on display in our Science and Art of Medicine gallery.

And feel free to ask for more details on Twitter using the #askacurator hashtag, or by posting a question in the comments below.

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Ask a curator day

August 30th, 2010 | by | meta, your questions

Aug
30

Is there a burning question that you’d like to ask a curator? Maybe what’s your favourite object? What’s the tiniest object in your collection? How do you go to the loo in space?

Early Space Shuttle ejection escape suit, 1979.

??! (NASA / Science & Society)

Well now’s your chance, because 1 September is ‘Ask a Curator Day’ – a unique worldwide Q&A session which lets you put questions to museums.

Ask a Curator logo

A crack team of Science Museum curators and other staff members will be standing by – so start thinking now.

All you have to do is tweet your question on Twitter using the #askacurator hashtag. If you don’t have a Twitter account, or your question just won’t fit into 140 characters you can also leave it as a comment below.

We’ll either tweet the answers or reply to your comments on this post. Particularly juicy questions that we want to answer at length might become the basis of future posts.

We’ll do our best to answer your questions, although some might take us a little while and we can’t guarantee to answer every single one.

Check out the two responses that our Transport Curator David made to this question that we were asked on Twitter: How did you get the planes into the Flight Gallery?

We’ve been setting the agenda on this blog for too long now – it’s over to you!

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How we got the planes in: part two

August 30th, 2010 | by | aviation, exhibitions, transport, your questions

Aug
30

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how we got the aircraft into our Flight gallery, in response to a Twitter question. I said I’d been to our photo archive to see if we had any pictures of the 1960s aircraft installation, and I turned up lots of great images.

Well, the scans have just arrived, so for those interested in how to get a Supermarine S6B world-speed-record-breaking aeroplane into a third-floor gallery in central London in 1961, here goes…

Supermarine S6B in mid-lift (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B in the air (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B perched on a ledge (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B ready to go in (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B on final approach (Science Museum)

Supermarine S6B has landed! The wings go on later (Science Museum)

And their suits are all still pristine!

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The Lady with the Lamp

August 27th, 2010 | by | medicine, women in science

Aug
27

On the 13th of this month was the centenary of Florence Nightingale’s death.

Florence Nightingale (A661274/1, Science Museum, London)

The Lady with the Lamp came to fame during the Crimean War by improving the standards of cleanliness and hygiene in hospital wards. Nightingale was believed to have dramatically reduced the death rates of soldiers from 40% to 2% in just two years. Recently, historians have suggested that the increase in survival rates was mainly due to improved sewage and ventilation systems, not just improved nursing standards.

Nightingale did do much to put nursing on a modern professional footing setting out not only hygiene practices but also moral and social conduct for nurses. A nurse must not be ”no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about the sick.”  The Nightingale Nursing School was set up in 1860 as part of St Thomas’ Hospital in London and it is still in existence today – now known as Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

Nightingale nurse figurine, 1963 (1984-1733, Science Museum, London)

Florence’s legacy not only lives on through training but also through objects in the Science Museum’s collections. Henry Wellcome collected a number of items belonging to Florence Nightingale such as her whistle, tea caddy, moccasins, parasol and shawl.

These objects are part of a number of famous person’s belongings - or relics as many people call them - that Wellcome acquired. If you visit the Wellcome Library take a look at the names that adorn the walkway around the seating area you’ll find that Florence is the only woman represented.

Florence Nightingale's shawl (A87224, Science Museum, London)

This shawl is now on show at the Florence Nightingale Museum where you can also see many other treasures relating to her life and work. The Wellcome Library also has an astonishing array of her papers.

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James Watt, RIP

August 25th, 2010 | by | art, engineering, exhibitions, james watt

Aug
25

James Watt died 191 years ago today. He was considered one of the most important engineers in the country, and after his death he was turned into a national hero. The result was a slew of statues, memorials and paintings – some of which will go on show in a new exhibition opening in spring 2011. More details to follow…

James Watt, Scottish engineer, 1792.

James Watt, Scottish engineer, 1792 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

When Watt was 59, his friend and partner Matthew Boulton introduced him to Carl von Breda, who painted the earliest portrait that that Watt was known to sit for. At the time, 1792, he was fighting to save their steam engine business from legal challenges, but was wealthy enough to have built his house Heathfield near Birmingham to suit his growing family.

James Watt from painting by Lawrence, 1813 (Science Museum / Science & Society)

By 1815, he was more relaxed, and more prepared to have his portrait painted. This one, by Thomas Lawrence, was much liked by the artist, who thought it was the finest he had ever painted, but the family – James Watt, and his eldest son James Watt Jnr – didn’t really care for it.

James Watt, Scottish engineer (Science Museum / Science & Society)

Another highly regarded artist, Sir Francis Chantrey, produced a marble bust for the Royal Academy exhibition in 1815. Watt was swathed in a toga-like cloak as a 19th century conceit to show he was a true philosopher.

The bust was much copied, and even Watt had a go, using the bust to test his sculpture-copying machines. He wrote to a friend “I do not think myself of importance enough to fill up so much of my friends’ houses as the original bust does”.

James Watt, British engineer, as a young man, c 1769 painted 1860. Science Museum / Science & Society

This was painted after Watt’s death, but he is shown as a young man studying a mal-functioning model of a Newcomen steam engine. The challenge of trying to get it to work put Watt on the road to perfecting full-size engines.

Bizarrely there was even a Japanese woodcut, prepared in the 1880s for primary school children, showing him testing the steam from a boiling kettle in his aunt’s house.

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