History of Science

Bergeron, Andrée; Bigg, Charlotte

2021 History of Science

doi: 10.1177/0073275320988399pmid: 33579167

With their landmark architectures, exhibitions and museums of science and technology partake in the spatial inscription of science in twentieth century landscapes. Unlike other beacons of progress, exhibitions and museums of science and technology double up, inside, as material arrangements of objects, visuals and texts aiming to confer meaning onto the modern world. They both embody and seek to order the spectacle of modernity while often being deployed with the aim of promoting particular visions of social and material progress. An approach sensitive to the material, spatial, and experiential dimensions of displaying science and technology suggests that exhibitions and museums were in the twentieth century crucial sites for reflecting upon and promoting particular futures.

Charles, Loïc; Giraud, Yann

2021 History of Science

doi: 10.1177/0073275317751316pmid: 29882432

Using as case studies the initiatives developed by two museum curators, the Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and the Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and their subsequent collaboration with an extended network of scientists, philanthropists, artists, and social activists, this article provides a portrait of the general movement toward the creation of a new form of museum: the “museum of the future,” as Neurath labeled it. This museum would be able to enlighten the people by showing the nature of modern industrial civilization. The promoters of the “museum of the future” intended to reform museum practices by organizing exhibitions of social facts, but also by integrating several dimensions – architecture, commerce, entertainment, pedagogy, and science and technology – to create a holistic frame to address their audience. However, the effortlessly circulating museum Neurath and Otlet envisioned stood in sharp contrast to the many, often immaterial, boundaries they encountered in their attempt to implement their vision. Ever-growing nationalism, the professionalization of social science, and the increasing commercialization of scientific vulgarization are some of the factors that help explain their failure.

Sastre-Juan, Jaume

2021 History of Science

doi: 10.1177/0073275317725239pmid: 29882430

This article analyzes the changing politics of hands-on display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry by following its urban deambulation within Midtown Manhattan, which went hand in hand with sharp shifts in promoters, narrative, and exhibition techniques. The museum was inaugurated in 1927 as the Museum of the Peaceful Arts on the 7th and 8th floors of the Scientific American Building. It changed its name in 1930 to the New York Museum of Science and Industry while on the 4th floor of the Daily News Building, and it was close to being renamed the Science Center when it finally moved in 1936 to the ground floor of the Rockefeller Center. The analysis of how the political agenda of the different promoters of the New York Museum of Science and Industry was spatially and performatively inscribed in each of its sites suggests that the 1930s boom of visitor-operated exhibits had nothing to do with an Exploratorium-like rhetoric of democratic empowerment. The social paternalistic ideology of the vocational education movement, the ideas on innovation of the early sociology of invention, and the corporate behavioral approach to mass communications are more suitable contexts in which to understand the changing politics of hands-on display in interwar American museums of science and industry.

Raposo, Pedro M. P.

2021 History of Science

doi: 10.1177/0073275318797809pmid: 30270660

Inaugurated in 1965, the Calouste Gulbenkian Planetarium (CGP) was the first institution of its kind in Portugal. The CGP was established in the context of the relocation of the Maritime Museum of Lisbon (Museu de Marinha) to Belém, an area of the Portuguese capital highly symbolic of Portuguese maritime and imperial history. The dictatorial regime known as Estado Novo used Belém as a ground for major events that affirmed the legitimacy of Portugal’s overseas empire by celebrating the maritime deeds of erstwhile sovereigns and navigators, in a mythical narrative of a glorious imperial destiny. Given the close association between astronomy and nautical science, the CGP was certain to gain a prominent place in the tapestry of Belém’s symbolic inscriptions. This paper addresses the inception of the CGP in its urban context, showing how this area of Lisbon provided an ideal backdrop for this institution, and how its foundation was promoted and steered by a naval officer and amateur astronomer who maintained an ambivalent relation with the regime: Eugénio da Conceição Silva (1903–69).

Fleming, Martha

2021 History of Science

doi: 10.1177/0073275319858528pmid: 31328558

Exhibitions are embodied knowledge, and the processes of making exhibitions are also in themselves knowledge production practices. Science and technology exhibitions are therefore doubly of interest to historians of science: both as epistemic agents and as research methods. Yet both exhibitions and exhibition-making practices are ephemeral, as is the subsequent experience of the visitor. How can we research, interrogate, and understand both the productive creation of exhibitions and the phenomenologies and epistemologies of their reception and impact? “Exhibition histories” has become a significant field of late, most closely associated with research on art exhibitions but also extending to world and trade fairs, and now increasingly crossing over into histories of science and technology. It is not an easy task: the range of exhibition archive materials includes – but is not limited to – 35mm slides, architectural blueprints, models, drawings, briefs, memos, budgets, press films, reviews, and personal accounts. This primary material is distributed unevenly across public and organized repositories, closed commercial archives, the personal papers of designers, often embargoed national bureaus of information, and more. Further, the experience of visiting an exhibition leaves far fewer traces to follow, requiring the researcher to do different kinds of things with the same widely varied material. This paper proposes methodologies for historians of science and technology wishing to understand the spatialization of science in exhibition contexts, the impacts of science exhibitions, and the more elusive phenomenological aspects of the exhibition visitor experience. Historians of science must accurately historicize context while researching both along and against the grain of archival material left by the making of exhibitions, as well as understanding the embodied trajectories of visitors. The practice of making exhibitions can also offer the researcher critically valuable insights into what to look for – and what may be absent – in archival records.