Abstract
Between 1919 and 1984, temporary exhibitions (called special exhibitions) were a major feature of the Museum’s displays. They had been advocated by the Bell Report of 1911 as a ‘means of keeping the Museum in direct touch with the movements of the day,’1 and the first such exhibition, on aeronautics, took place in 1912.2 As Mackintosh notes in his internally produced handbook, ‘Special Exhibitions at the Science Museum’:
up to 1926 various exhibitions and celebrations of anniversaries were held, all on a fairly modest scale and in the galleries appropriate to the subject: considerable dislocation of the permanent collections was entailed, which sometimes evoked legitimate grumbling from the more studious and regular visitor.3
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Notes
The best history of television manufacture is Keith Geddes (with Gordon Bussey), The Set-Makers: A History of the Radio and Television Industry (London: BREMA, 1991). Also see Russell W. Burns, British Television: The Formative Years (London: Peregrinus, in association with the Science Museum, 1986) and Burns, Television: The International History of the Formative Years (London: IEE, 1998).
G.R.M. Garratt, ed., Television: An Account of the Development and General Principles of the Television as illustrated by a Special Exhibition held at the Science Museum, June–September 1937 (London: HMSO, 1937).
For this controversy see Sarah Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 45–76.
For the history of the Chemical Society, see T.S. Moore and J.C. Philip, The Chemical Society, 1841–1941: A Historical Review (London: Chemical Society, 1947);
D.H. Whiffen and D.H. Hey, The Royal Society of Chemistry: The First 150 Years (London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1991); and
Robert F. Bud, ‘The Discipline of Chemistry: The Origin and Early Years of the Chemical Society of London’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1980.
Also see C.A. Russell, N.G. Coley and G.K. Roberts, Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1977). For the history of the celebrations themselves, see A Record of the Centenary Celebrations (London: Chemical Society, 1948). And for the Science Museum’s treatment of atomic science, see
Sophie Forgan ‘Atoms in Wonderland’, History and Technology 19 (2003), pp. 177–96.
See his biography G. M. Bennett, ‘Robertson, Sir Robert (1869–1949)’, rev. K. D. Watson, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35785, accessed 19 Jan 2010], and for his work at the Laboratory of the Government Chemist see P.W. Hammond and H. Egan, Weighed in the Balance: A History of the Laboratory of the Government Chemist (London: HMSO, 1992), chapter 15.
Alexander Findlay, A Hundred Years of Chemistry (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1937). It was reissued in a revised version by Trevor I. Williams in 1948, presumably to capitalise on the interest generated by the exhibition. For the centenary celebrations, Findlay produced a compendium of biographical memoirs, British Chemists (London: Chemical Society, 1947), with W.H. Mills.
F. Sherwood Taylor, A Century of British Chemistry (London: Longman Green, 1947). For the papers relating to this book (and Sherwood Taylor’s involvement with this exhibition as a whole), see folders 132 to 137, MSS Taylor, Archives of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. I am indebted to Tony Simcock for this reference.
For a detailed study of this crisis, see Alex J Robertson, The Bleak Midwinter: 1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). For a more general history of the coal industry in this period, see chapters 4 and 5 of
William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, volume 5, 1946–1982: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
There is currently no scholarly history of the oil industry as a whole. For popular accounts see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1991) and
Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, 3rd edn (London: Coronet Books, 1993). For the history of Royal Dutch/Shell, see
Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joost Jonker and Stephen Howarth, A History of Royal Dutch Shell, four volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For Anglo-Iranian/BP, see
James Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, volume 2, The Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and
Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 19501975: The Challenge of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
For the history of the British gas industry in the 1950s and 1960s leading up to the changeover to natural gas, see Trevor I. Williams, A History of the British Gas Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) and
Andrew Jenkins, ‘Government Intervention in the British Gas Industry’, Business History 46 (2004), pp. 57–78. Surprisingly, there has so far been no scholarly account of the changeover process in any depth, but see chapter 17 of Williams’s volume for a good account of the technical process of conversion.
Edward W. Said’s path-breaking but controversial book on orientalism was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1978, just two years after this festival. For a more recent edition, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003).
For general accounts of the 1975 ‘World of Islam Festival’ see Harold Beeley, ‘The World of Islam Festival, London 1976’, Museum 30(1) (1978), pp. 10–11, and
John Sabini, ‘The World of Islam’, Saudi Aramco World 27/3 (May/June 1976), available online at http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197603/the.world.of.islam-its.festival.htm (accessed 20 January 2010). For the Science Museum’s exhibition (with illustrations of the exhibits) see David B. Thomas, ‘Science and Technology in Islam: An Exhibition at the Science Museum’, Museum 30(1) (1978), pp. 18–21.
Personal communication from Paul Keeler, dated 5 May 2009. Maddison and Turner helped to produce a exhibition catalogue at the time, but Maddison’s efforts to produce a scholarly ‘catalogue raisonne’ were probably defeated by his own perfectionism; personal communications from Tony Simcock, dated 3 March 2009 and 4 September 2009. Leonard Harrow and Peter Lambourn Wilson, Science and Technology in Islam: An Exhibition at the Science Museum, London … based on information and research by F. R. Maddison and A. J. Turner. ([London]: Crescent Moon Press, 1976).
Perhaps surprisingly, there is no scholarly history of the microprocessor itself, but its development and impact can be traced through histories of the computer, for which see Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998) and
Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
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Morris, P.J.T. (2010). ‘An Effective Organ of Public Enlightenment’: The Role of Temporary Exhibitions in the Science Museum. In: Morris, P.J.T. (eds) Science for the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283145_11
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