Stories from the stores

A star-crossed birthday for Dickens

February 7th, 2012 | by | astronomy, quirky

Feb
07

Today, people around the world are celebrating Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday. Hopefully they’ll enjoy themselves more than Dickens himself did on a youthful birthday outing:

‘Slow torture’ … ‘it was awful’ … ‘very alarming’ … ‘I thought if this were a birthday it were better never to have been born’.

Is Dickens recalling that terrible birthday? (National Media Museum)

Dickens looked back on this beleaguered birthday in an All the Year Round article of 1863. The subject of his ire was an astronomical lecture, a popular entertainment of the time. The young Dickens was unimpressed with the ageing and shabby demonstration instrument, ‘at least one thousand stars and twenty five comets behind the age’, with poor likenesses of the celestial bodies and malfunctioning light effects. The lecturer also droned on, tapping away at the model ‘like a wearisome woodpecker’.

Dickens might have had better luck with Mr Bartley’s lectures. Bartley was a comedian for most of the year, but turned his talents to astronomy when the comedy shows stopped for Lent.

Would Mr Bartley have entertained Dickens? (Science Museum)

19th century astronomical shows were often spectacular theatrical events – perhaps why Dickens was so disappointed with the shabby and outdated performance he encountered. Lecturers travelled the country, advertising their wares with increasingly outlandish names for their demonstration instruments.  Audiences might encounter the Eidouranion in Rochester, or be dazzled by the Dioastrodoxon in Wakefield.

You can find out more about scientific showbiz in Richard Altick’s The Shows of London, or Iwan Rhys Morus’s When Physics Became King. Or why not sample the Science Museum’s present-day versions? I wonder what Dickens would have made of them…

 
 

 

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Remarkable radium

December 10th, 2011 | by | chemistry, women in science

Dec
10

100 years ago today, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The citation recognised ‘the discovery of the elements radium and polonium … the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’.

Marie and Pierre Curie as portrayed by Imp in Vanity Fair magazine, 1904. Pierre was killed in a road accident two years later. (Science Museum)

Isolating radium from pitchblende was a laborious process, with a ton of ore yielding only a tenth of a gram of the new substance. In the early 20th century radium was a hot commodity, with the world’s small supply in demand for scientific, medical and industrial research. Curie established a Radium Institute in Paris to carry out research into radioactivity and continue production of radium and other substances.

Certificate specifying radium content, signed by Curie in 1926 (Science Museum).

Radium’s reputation as a wonder-substance led to a public craze for radium therapies. The vast array of quack cures for sale included filters to make water radioactive, radium buttons, soap, and even toothpaste.

Advert for a compress made by Radium Vita Limited which operated 1933-54 (Alison Boyle).

The dangers of radioactive substances only became widely understood later. Curie herself died in 1934 from illness related to years of exposure. You can find out more about Marie Curie in the Science Museum’s online exhibit. And if you want to know what William Crookes did with radium, come along to this talk by my colleague Jane on 15 December…

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Marvellous moustaches

November 1st, 2011 | by | quirky

Nov
01

It’s November, which means that some of your friends may sprout some dubious facial hair over the next few weeks.

Yes, it’s that time of year again when thousands of blokes bid goodbye to their razors and grow a moustache to raise awareness for men’s health issues. For anyone unsure which style to adopt, there’s plenty of inspiration to be found in the Science Museum.

The most famous scientific moustache is of course Albert Einstein’s, which has spawned some truly terrifying memorabilia (none of which, I hasten to add, carry a Science Museum endorsement).

Einstein tries to work out the equation for the perfect moustache curvature (AP / Science & Society).

However, Einstein’s bristles are roundly trumped by Henry Wellcome, whose extraordinary collections are housed by the Museum. Follow the growth and decline of his moustache in this online exhibit from our friends at the Wellcome Library.

Henry Wellcome's hirsute splendour (Wellcome Library, London)

Even these marvels pale into insignificance beside 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe, although only the very ambitious would attempt to emulate his legendary silver nose.

Tycho Brahe's facial hair features prominently in this engraving of 1586 (Science Museum).

Such hirsute frivolity won’t be to everyone’s taste. But the clean-shaven should spare a thought for the 634 men of the South Eastern Railway Company who in November 1877 signed this petition asking for a ban on ‘taches to be lifted ‘believing and being advised that the wearing of Moustaches is a protection against the inclemency of the weather’.

More moustaches, please - an 1877 petition (National Railway Museum).

Some of the Science Museum team will be growing moustaches for the month, so watch out for hairy guys when you visit the galleries!

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Our stormy Sun

August 24th, 2011 | by | astronomy, communication

Aug
24

Astronomers have announced that they can now track sunspots forming before the tell-tale dark spots reach the Sun’s surface.

The spots are caused by magnetic activity inside the Sun, and are associated with solar storms, massive bursts of material coming from our star. NASA recently released these staggering observations of our little blue planet being swamped by a sunstorm.

Better prediction of solar storms is vital to protect our communication, navigation and power systems. In 1859 the biggest solar storm on record zapped telegraph systems around the world, with some equipment even bursting into flames. Magnetic compasses went haywire. Aurorae lit up the sky. In today’s wired world, a big storm could be catastrophic.

In 1859, Richard Carrington observed a large group of sunspots, and two solar flares. The flares' path is marked A-C and B-D. This was one of the first observations of solar flares, which Carrington suspected were the cause of the disruption on Earth. (Science Museum)

Accurate space weather predictions would allow authorities to prevent the worst effects of a solar storm by taking satellites offline and shielding power grids. With changes in the Sun’s cycles of sunspot activity, this could become increasingly important over the next few decades.

Today’s solar weather forecasters are the latest in a long tradition of sunspot-spotters. Here are a few illustrations from our collections.

A 1612 illustration of Galileo's observations of sunspots. Galileo was one of several astronomers who independently observed sunspots with a telescope in 1610 (Science Museum).

James Nasmyth's painting of a sunspot, 1860, reveals the extraordinary detail visible through his 20-inch reflecting telescope (Science Museum).

This X-ray map of the Sun's active regions was based on photographs taken from the Skylab space station in 1975 (NASA / Science & Society).

While solar weather can be troublesome, here’s hoping for sunny weather of a different sort for the last few weeks of school holidays. Once again, the Great British Summer has been a bit of a damp squib. Some things never change…

Braving the chill on Brighton Beach in 1966 (NMeM / Tony Ray-Jones).

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Einstein was right!

May 5th, 2011 | by | astronomy, current science, exhibitions, physics

May
05

We sometimes find that objects in our collections suddenly become newsworthy because of events beyond the Museum. This beautiful, but small and unassuming, object on display in Cosmos & Culture is now one of them.

Small, but perfectly formed (Science Museum)

It’s a prototype gyroscope from the Gravity Probe B experiment, which has been testing predictions made by Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that a massive body such as the Earth should warp and twist the space-time around it.

Four spheres like this one – among the most perfect ever made – were set spinning on a spacecraft precisely pointed towards a guide star. Scientists spent several years ploughing through data to see if the angle of the spheres’ spin was altered by the warp and twist, and yesterday NASA announced the results. They’re just as Einstein predicted.

We acquired the gyroscope back in 2005, while the spacecraft was busy gathering data, and I was lucky enough to meet chief scientist Francis Everitt.

At the time he was non-commital about what the experiment might reveal: ‘There’s many reasons for thinking that as magnificent as the advance General Relativity gives, it’s not quite the final answer. Whether, for example, in our experiment or not one will find anything different from Einstein, I’ve no wish to make any prediction about. Our job is to do the experiment. But physics advances, science advances, by measuring things’.

The results are a huge vindication for the Gravity Probe B project - it was in the planning for over 40 years and the mission faced cancellation several times. But, as Everitt says, we still may not have the final answer.

General relativity is so complex that there are many other predictions of the theory which are yet to be confirmed, and other scientists are busy making their own measurements. Some of the experiments haven’t even started yet. This is a prototype part for Advanced LIGO, a ground-based experiment due to be completed in 2015.

Will Advanced LIGO also prove Einstein right? (Science Museum)

Here‘s how it works … and here‘s how we put it together for exhibition display (cue lots of head-scratching from our Workshops team). Some time after 2015, might this object also be hitting the headlines?

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