Abstract
In 1910, the future novelist and aircraft designer, Nevil Shute, discovered the Science Museum. By bunking off school and paying a penny excess fare on the London Underground, the 11-year-old discovered:
a wonderland of mechanical models in glass cases, among examples of the real thing. There was the actual original locomotive, Stephenson’s Rocket, and dozens of scale models in glass cases, some of which would go by compressed air when you pressed a button. There were working models of steam hammers, and looms, and motor cars, and beam engines, and above all, there were aeroplanes. For ten days I browsed in this wonderland …1
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Notes
Nevil Shute, Slide Rule; the Autobiography of an Engineer (London: Heinemann, 1954). He wrote as Nevil Shute, though he used his full name, Nevil Shute Norway, for his parallel career in aircraft design and aviation. However, his novels and his engineering were linked, as, for instance, in his 1948 novel No Highway, which presaged, in an uncanny way, the metal fatigue failures of the Comet airliner.
Ghislaine Lawrence, ‘Museums and the Spectacular’, in Museums and Late Twentieth Century. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 69–80.
Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Material Models as Visual Culture’, in Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood Models: the Third Dimension of Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 448. These essays provide much useful context on the development and wider use of models in museums, as well as in science and engineering generally.
W.T. O’Dea, ‘The Science Museum’s Agricultural Gallery’, Museums Journal 51 (1952), pp. 229–301, on p. 299.
Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory 45 (February 2006), pp. 1–29.
See, for example, Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (eds), Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber, 1996).
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Nahum, A. (2010). Exhibiting Science: Changing Conceptions of Science Museum Display. In: Morris, P.J.T. (eds) Science for the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283145_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283145_9
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