TY - JOUR
AU - Boyle,, Alison
AB - Abstract This paper examines how modern physics was collected and displayed in the UK over the (long) twentieth century, focusing on the national collections in the Science Museum, London. The emergence and establishment of modern physics roughly overlaps with the development of distinct science and technology museums. This provides an opportunity to explore how collections are shaped in response to scientists’ own narratives of their professional identities, institutional or political priorities, and how certain aspects of the material culture of a scientific area can become closely intertwined with its public image. By tracing the movement of a well-known artefact of modern physics – a cathode-ray tube used by J. J. Thomson in his ‘electron’ experiments – I show how collection boundaries could be porous, although overall collection framings persisted. It has been realised for some time that the Museum has lagged behind in illustrating the development of what is somewhat loosely termed “Modern Physics” or “The New Physics” as distinct from “Classical Physics”, and an effort is now to be made to fill up this gap . . . Careful consideration has been devoted to the problem of interesting the general public in such an abstruse subject. Report of the Advisory Council of the Science Museum for the year 1935. The emergence of ‘“Modern Physics” . . . as distinct from “Classical Physics”’, which was a matter concerning Science Museum curators in 1935, has been investigated by historians in recent years. While the early decades of the twentieth century did involve reassessments of the fundamental nature of matter, these built on late nineteenth-century work rather than radically breaking with the past.1 The notion of rapid change became established only later, with the 1911 Solvay Council retrospectively embedded in physicists’ memories as the point of a break with ‘classical physics’, even though the meeting saw much debate.2 However, as shown in Imogen Clarke’s survey of the picture in Britain between 1900 and 1940, even into the late 1930s physicists adopted various differing notions of ‘modern’ physics, particularly in presenting their work to wider audiences.3 For many, breaking with the past would have threatened the notion of physics as a stable and authoritative discipline; the emergence of modern physics was to be couched in a process of continuity and improvement, rather than discontinuity and rejection.4 This paper examines what ‘modern physics’ came to mean in the Science Museum, forming the material history of a new discipline in the UK’s national physics collections. Exploring the networks with which curators interacted for collecting and for displaying the collection as it grew to maturity over several decades, external influences are traced which shaped the public presentation of the new physics. While this issue focuses on collections rather than the objects in them, I intend to use the biography of a particular object as a tool to interrogate the larger category of collections. In a large collection such as the Science Museum’s, subdivided into different named collections, the object approach can help to provide a sense of what was in a collection at any given time, and the tone of how that collection was interpreted.5 Throughout this paper I will track J. J. Thomson’s apparatus associated with the discovery of the electron; today it sits as the earliest-accessioned object in the Science Museum’s ‘Nuclear Physics’ collection, but long pre-dates the birth of such a collection. As we shall see, this glass tube became one of the key objects in symbolizing new disciplines; its public career has spanned almost all of the Science Museum’s history, allowing us to trace how conceptions of modern physics shifted from the working worlds of the nineteenth century, through narratives of pure and applied science, to the ‘bomb historiography’ of the late twentieth century. Foundations: collections as training for working worlds The collections of the nascent Science Museum in the late nineteenth century were something of a mixed bag. At the South Kensington Museum, items amassed from the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus mixed the historical with recent examples of the best of British make. Collections transferred from the Patent Office Museum celebrated the history of invention, while the educational collections of the South Kensington Museum had been established to guide teachers of science in the current best practice.6 The future shape of the collections was set by an 1886–9 Parliamentary Inquiry with a committee structure mirroring those of the 1876 exhibition and the British Association for the Advancement of Science; the inquiry in turn drew heavily on the recommendations of an 1881 committee, including the professors of the Department of Science and Art’s Normal School of Science. Thus from their earliest days the collections were inherently shaped around conservative disciplinary categories.7 As we shall see, these categories proved enduring. Recommendations for physics were given by the Department of Science and Art’s Frederic Guthrie, holder of a professorship since 1869. He was a founder-member of the Physical Society, of which almost every major physicist in Britain was a member by the time of his Presidency from 1884 to 1886; over 100,000 people were trained via the Department’s curriculum in physics.8 Therefore, his view of what constituted essential knowledge of physics was likely to be widely shared. Guthrie had been at the forefront of developing physics teaching methods geared towards engineers, science teachers and telegraphists, with an emphasis on exact measurement.9 It appears that he had little regard for purely mathematical approaches to physics.10 Thus, from the outset of the Science Museum’s displays, the presentation of physics was focused on instrumentation and experimental technique, with a strong slant towards industrial applications. In Guthrie’s view the main object of the collection ‘should be to illustrate by apparatus the various steps in physical discovery and its applications’, drawing out ‘critical discoveries or methods’ such as Boyle’s Law or the dispersal of light through a prism.11 Apparatus for technical use, such as astronomical or meteorological equipment, would logically follow. A small amount of space would be allocated for objects of ‘sentimental antiquarian interest’ such as Newton’s pen (Newton’s prism was excluded from this, presumably as falling into the ‘critical discoveries’ section). The teaching collections should largely be dispersed to schools. The museum’s collections broadly reflected the Normal School’s physics curriculum: the two catalogues published in 1894 and 1905 show slight organizational variation but are largely based around Mechanics, Sound, Heat, Light, Magnetism and Electricity. Keeping pace with recent developments in physics, the 1905 catalogue had a new subcategory under Magnetism and Electricity for ‘Cathode Rays and Röntgen Rays’.12 In 1901 J. J. Thomson loaned his ‘apparatus for measuring the velocity of the cathode rays, and the ratio of the mass of the carriers to the charge carried by them’, part of the equipment he had used in his now-famous 1897 experiments leading to the discovery of what would become known as the electron (Fig. 1).13 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide The cathode ray tube deposited by J.J. Thomson with the South Kensington Museum, now at the Science Museum (object number 1901-51). © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide The cathode ray tube deposited by J.J. Thomson with the South Kensington Museum, now at the Science Museum (object number 1901-51). © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. The new studies of rays, radiations and particles at the end of the nineteenth century reflected working world concerns: experimental physicists such as Thomson and Wilhelm Röntgen benefited from improved vacuum pumps developed for the electric light bulb industry.14 The collections reflected these working worlds: with categories dictated by the Department of Science and Art’s curricula, the physical arrangement of the displays for the new fields also blurred the lines between research and applications. In the early twentieth century the collections were separated by Imperial Institute Road (now Imperial College Road), with the Southern Galleries housing Machinery and Inventions, Naval and Marine Engineering, and the Buckland Fish Collection. The Science Collections were mainly housed in the Western Galleries (Fig. 2). However, physics was housed in the Southern Galleries from 1908 to 1912, and in 1909 was supplemented by a large loan of x-ray focus tubes from the Röntgen Society.15 By 1912 the Physics collections had moved back across the road but ‘Magnetism and Electricity’ (including the apparatus for Cathode Rays and Röntgen Rays) stayed in the Southern Galleries alongside collections of Electrical Measuring Instruments, Electrical Generators, Electric Lighting and Telegraphy.16 Until the 1920s, Electricity, including the properties of cathode rays, would be displayed alongside Electrical Engineering. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Part of the Science Museum’s Western Galleries, c. 1913. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Part of the Science Museum’s Western Galleries, c. 1913. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. A new museum and grand schemes for physics Plans for the move of an independent Science Museum (as it was formally designated in 1909) into new premises brought the opportunity to consider wholesale reorganization of the collections. The museum’s staff were heavily influenced by the recommendations of the 1911 Departmental Committee on the Science Museum and the Geological Committee, chaired by Sir Hugh Bell. The Bell Committee endorsed the museum’s educational remit, stating that ‘so far as is possible by means of exhibited scientific instruments and apparatus, machines and other objects, the Collections in the Science Museum ought to afford illustration and exposition of the various branches of Science within its field and of their Application to the Arts and Industries’.17 The museum ‘ought also to be a worthy and suitable house for the preservation of appliances which hold honoured place in the progress of Science or the history of invention’.18 While Guthrie’s earlier proposals had allocated space for ‘critical discoveries’ for teaching purposes and a small amount of space for ‘sentimental antiquarian interest’, the Bell Report provided, as Xerxes Mazda has noted, an explicit mandate for the museum to cover the history of science and technology.19 Finding the right balance between history and recent developments would occupy directors’ plans for the rest of the century.20 Implementation of the Bell Committee’s recommendations was piecemeal over the coming decades, with the physics collections particularly suffering from delays. Gallery space was commandeered for First World War administration, and later for temporary housing for the new Imperial War Museum.21 The entire science collection had to be removed to storage for some years. Plans for the redisplay of these, under the aegis of the museum’s new director Henry Lyons, were designed to implement the Bell framework and attract more general-interest visitors. Although these plans were not realized, the surviving scoping documents give an indication as to how the Science Museum conceptualized ‘modern physics’ as new fields reached maturity. Lyons outlined his vision for repositioning the museum in a memorandum of 1922, seeing the new building as an opportunity to remove the physical split between the science collections and the engineering and industrial connections. While clearly influenced by the Bell Report, Lyons was more explicit in articulating an evolutionary link between science and industry: he aimed ‘to illustrate the influence of science on industry and to show the development which has been achieved thereby’.22 He proposed that pure science collections would be displayed alongside fields which had developed from them (for example electrical engineering or industrial chemistry). This echoes an emerging trend in the early twentieth century towards a notion of ‘applied science’ as subordinate to ‘pure science’ rather than as its own distinct field.23 Interpretation of the collection, which had previously been for the already technically-inclined, would give priority to the ‘ordinary visitor’, followed by ‘the technical visitor’, ‘the student’ and ‘the specialist’. In 1923 Lyons regrouped the collections into Industrial Machinery, Manufacture etc; Mechanical Engineering, Land Transport, Construction etc; Water Transport, Air Transport etc; and Science and Scientific Instruments. According to Lyons’s vision, the exhibits for each major collections group would feature historical series, based on the permanent collections, and examples illustrating current practice, generally on loan to allow updates.24 Lyons later reflected that though his memorandum ‘was discussed ad nauseam at many meetings with the Higher Staff’ he did not receive much input from them and pushed the scheme forward himself; his junior staff members worked on the scheme but ‘the older ones accepted it under mute protest and did . . . ? . . .’25 This seems to have led him to seek scientists’ advice for the redisplay of some of the collections: an astronomy scheme was drawn up by Harold Spencer-Jones, His Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, while physicist Edward Andrade was approached to input on a new section called Properties of Matter and Physical Phenomena. Neither of these were realized: as the Science group keeper David Baxandall somewhat scathingly noted, Spencer-Jones’s scheme was almost identical to the existing collection arrangement, while correspondence with Andrade does not appear to have elicited much response.26 Over the next few decades two of the museum’s curators would try to develop the physics scheme, but it never came to pass. Lyons envisaged Physical Phenomena, as it became known in museum shorthand, as a section which would cover principles and laws spanning the existing sections.27 As Clarke has shown, Lyons’s desire for such a scheme was influenced by his stint on the committee for the Royal Society’s Exhibition of Pure Science at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, which ran from April to November 1924 and again in 1925. Science demonstrations featured in various parts of the Wembley site as background to industrial applications (for example the chemical industries and engineering) but the Royal Society’s contribution was envisaged as focusing on recent British research in the fundamental sciences.28 Thus, the physics section, rather than using the usual teaching-led categories such as light, sound, or electricity and magnetism was organized around phenomena of recent interest: the electron, thermionics, photo-electricity, positive rays and radioactivity. The exhibition featured Thomson’s cathode ray tube on loan from the Science Museum, and now in a label by Thomson himself reified as the actual apparatus ‘by which the existence of electrons was detected and their mass and velocity measured’.29 The exhibition handbook’s introduction to the physics section was written by Richard Glazebrook, chairman of the Exhibition Committee. Although Glazebrook was a former Head of the National Physical Laboratory and a longstanding champion of precision measurement and standardization, his introduction explicitly stated the case for ‘pure research’: discoveries and inventions arose from ‘men seeking . . . to discover “how things go”, without any thought of their ulterior applications’.30 This reflected the reductionist, research-for-research’s-sake view of Ernest Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory, a major contributor to the exhibits; Rutherford positioned development as arising neither from utilitarian applied science nor from theory, but grounded firmly in experiment.31 For the exhibition’s second run in 1925 the physics section was even more explicitly organized around fundamental physics: most of the exhibition was laid out according to an extended electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays to wireless and long waves.32 However, Glazebrook’s introduction was not reprinted, and applications of the new areas of research featured throughout – exhibits from the National Physical Laboratory and the Research Laboratories of General Electric which had been in the chemistry or engineering halls of the 1924 version were now featured alongside those from the universities. An exception was the ‘Atom’ section, which retained its university and ‘pure science’ focus. This section would influence the scheme for the museum’s Physical Phenomena section as developed by assistant keeper Herman Shaw. His proposal spanned seven groups of phenomena, within which he attempted to introduce new scientific areas alongside the museum’s existing coverage; that certain topics could appear across more than one group shows that exact collection categories were still to be settled. Sections such as Thermal Phenomena, Acoustical Phenomena, Optical Phenomena and Magnetic and Electrical Phenomena resembled the existing categories. As before, cathode rays appeared in the latter, but were now also proposed for a section called General Physical Phenomena which covered wave motion, conduction (including discharge tubes and cathode particles), convection, and radiation (including cathode rays and x-rays, radiation and quantum theory). A section on Constitution of Matter (including atomic structure and the discovery of the electron alongside molecular structure and states of aggregation) would feature the ‘History of the Electron from the British Empire Exhibition’, presumably replicating the display of Thomson’s cathode ray tube in terms of Rutherford’s reductionist atomic narrative. The Properties of Matter section introduced relativity alongside rigid and elastic bodies and the study of fluids.33 Meanwhile, the Thomson tube was simultaneously slated for a proposal by another curatorial department, showing how collection objects could be appropriated for new or existing categories by a change of emphasis in their interpretation. In the Electrical Instruments department the tube would have been part of an x-rays section (largely built around the Röntgen Society’s collection and focusing heavily on applications in radiology): here it was part of an historical series where assorted ‘vacuum tubes other than x-ray tubes’ were largely subsidiary to a narrative about the properties and applications of x-rays.34 Following discussions between the curators and director as to whether it should sit with x-rays or Physical Phenomena, the latter won the day, perhaps not surprisingly as it was a scheme of Lyons’s own instigation. However, the scheme progressed no further; Lyons seems to have felt that Shaw’s scheme did not move far enough away from what his letter to Andrade described as ‘the old water-tight compartments of light, heat and sound’, and his attentions became diverted towards the museum’s new temporary exhibition programme – a convenient vehicle to meet the government’s desire for the museum to showcase the latest developments in British industry.35 Defining a ‘modern physics’ collection Lyons retired in 1933, and with E.E.B. Mackintosh taking over as director, attempts to create a synoptic physics gallery were resurrected. Shaw had been promoted to keeper on Baxandall’s retirement in 1934, and his Physical Phenomena scheme was dusted off for Francis A. B. Ward to update. Ward, who had joined the museum in 1931, had previously worked at the Cavendish Laboratory with Rutherford.36 Ward recommended that the scheme be divided into two: Structure of Matter, and Physical Phenomena. The latter bore some resemblance to Shaw’s scheme, with categories for Vibrations and Wave Motion (including acoustics), and Thermal, Electrical and Optical Phenomena. However, Ward envisaged using demonstrations rather than the collections: these would cross-reference the relevant museum sections of Light, Heat, Sound etc ‘in which the development of the practical application is shown’.37 Thus, while Ward’s introductory displays followed Lyons’s desire for a new approach along the lines of the British Empire Exhibition, as far as the collections were concerned the nineteenth-century categories would still apply. Structure of Matter did use the collections, introducing a new category which the existing configurations did not neatly cover. Ward envisaged that it would include the structure of the atom and how atoms combined into molecules to form solids, liquids and gases, with working demonstrations illustrating experiments. A subsection on the constitution of the atom would feature J. J. Thomson, F. W. Aston, and W. L. Bragg. Recent developments in quantum theory would be addressed by models or representations of the Schrödinger atom. Another subsection would cover radioactivity and the structure of the nucleus, including the apparatus used by Cockcroft and Walton to split the atom in 1932. The scheme for Structure of Matter seems to have been a way of giving formal shape to a new collection that had been developing ad hoc since the late 1920s, based on Lyons’s and Ward’s personal connections with physicists. It was displayed on the second-floor landing, a space that seems to have been colonized to cover research about the atom which did not sit neatly in the existing galleries. In 1926, W. L. Bragg loaned models illustrating the Rutherford-Bohr atomic theory (he remarked they would probably be outdated within a few years due to rapidly-changing ideas about atomic structure; his lack of concern for the artefacts was evident in their being sent to the museum care of the guard on the Manchester-London train).38 The following year, Aston’s mass spectrograph, used in identifying different isotopes of atoms, joined from the Cavendish. Aston and Lyons originally planned that this would be displayed with a dummy magnet, enabling Aston to keep the original for research, but Aston eventually decided that the real magnet should be shown for historical interest (he was also swayed by the dummy not being much cheaper than a replacement for the laboratory).39 Following the sensational announcement in April 1932 that John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton had split the atom, the museum moved rapidly (in museum terms) to update the displays with diagrams and photographs of their apparatus. In 1934, Rutherford presented the museum with parts of the apparatus no longer needed for experiments. Somewhat fewer original parts than intended ended up on display, however. Walton had been rather dismissive of the museum’s safety worries about a crack in the upper part of the accelerating tube, commenting that ‘We have had a number of such cracks here, some of them very bad ones, but we have never known the apparatus to fall on our heads as a result of them . . . In some ways a cracked cylinder would be more instructive as it would show the difficulties one is up against in this kind of work.’40 The museum was less sanguine, and sent the tube for repair, which extended the crack further so the tube had to be replaced. This practice of restoring objects to ‘exhibition condition’, even if it destroyed historical evidence, persisted in the museum for several decades.41 Overall we see here the pragmatic realities of collecting in a rapidly-developing field: the museum staff had to rely on what was available from the physicists and largely made use of personal contacts, resulting in a British focus with the Cavendish Laboratory (not surprisingly) prominent. If items were unavailable or unsuitable for display, covering the latest British achievements took precedence over authenticity and preservation. The 1935 Annual Report, presenting Ward’s new schemes, noted that ‘It has been realised for some time that the Museum has lagged behind in illustrating the development of what is somewhat loosely termed “Modern Physics” or “The New Physics” as distinct from “Classical Physics” and an effort is now to be made to fill up this gap . . . Careful consideration has been devoted to the problem of interesting the general public in such an abstruse subject.’ The new physics was defined as ‘the properties of individual molecules and atoms and with the structure of the atom itself’.42Structure of Matter had subsections for states of matter, and the study of structures using x-ray and electron diffraction – but these were said to ‘deal mainly with classical physics’ and to ‘lead up to the new physics’, which was couched firmly in terms of the atom. Relativity, which Shaw had included in his 1924 scheme, was omitted in Ward’s version. The only representation in the collections was an aspect of relativity that could be classed within the museum’s existing category of astronomical observation: in 1920, the museum had acquired from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, a photograph from the 1919 eclipse expedition to Sobral, Brazil, which confirmed predictions of Einstein’s general theory. In Spencer Jones’s 1924 scheme, this was listed amongst other photographs of the solar corona taken during eclipses and the reference to the relativity experiment was in parentheses.43 Although a small exhibition on Modern Astronomy in the entrance hall to accompany James Jeans’s 1930 bbc lectures proved popular, curatorial attention mainly focused on the collection’s great strengths in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments. Representation in other UK collections was equally thin: the Royal Observatory also confined itself to the Sobral eclipse photographs, and there was nothing related in the Royal Scottish Museum.44 Indeed, what is probably the best-known representation of Einstein’s work in a UK museum is something of an anomaly: in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford – known particularly for its early-modern collections – visitors troop past other exhibits to gaze in awe at a blackboard used by Einstein for a 1931 lecture.45 The blackboard was salvaged after the lecture by some attendees including curator Robert Gunther (it appears that a second may have been wiped clean at some stage).46 In its current situation it is a ‘mutant object’: its original function lost to most, it acts as a carrier of the Einstein ‘aura’ rather than connecting to the museum’s wider collections.47 Thus, at the Science Museum, the ‘modern physics’ collection became associated with atomic physics, despite a wider range of possible topics it might have constituted. Aside from relativity, Jeff Hughes’s survey of British physics in the first decades of the twentieth century identifies many other areas of work, including x-ray crystallography (notably W. H. Bragg and W. L. Bragg in London and Manchester), low-temperature research at the Royal Institution and Peter Kapitza’s lab at the Cavendish, developments in precision instrumentation at the National Physical Laboratory, theoretical physics in Bristol and Cambridge, gas discharge work in Aberdeen and spectroscopy in Oxford. There were also a slew of physicists working on military research and in the communications industries. As Clarke notes, Ward’s alignment of modern physics with microphysics reflects his earlier professional experience under Rutherford at the Cavendish (and perhaps Rutherford’s disregard for relativity).48 However, this alone does not explain the narrow focus of the collection – the Cavendish’s own research portfolio was broader than this. As a national museum curator, Ward was able to attend scientific conferences and would not have struggled forming contacts; he was comfortable with tackling subjects beyond his original training, eventually becoming a respected expert in horology.49 I argue here that the inertia of the collections also played a part, with pre-existing categories and their framing largely dictating object designations. From the outset, the physics collections had been instrument-focused, not lending themselves to representing largely theoretical areas such as relativity. Some instruments acquired to reflect current physics research could already be logically accommodated by nineteenth-century categories such as geophysics or chemistry (where W. H. Bragg’s x-ray spectrometer wound up, despite his 1915 Nobel Prize being for Physics).50 Meanwhile, a 1936 special exhibition on low-temperature research (particularly that of Kapitza at the Cavendish) was considered the remit of the Engineering department’s Refrigeration curator, while Ward mounted a pure-research exhibition of atom track photographs the following year.51 Thus, the museum’s long-standing split between ‘science’ and ‘industry’ was dictating where ‘modern physics’ could end up. The new studies of the atom were increasingly identified by their practitioners as physics rather than chemistry but had not yet matured to industrial applications. The Structure of Matter collection, therefore, became focused on what the physics collections could not already accommodate elsewhere: the atom. Following the Second World War, with applications of atomic research now revealed all too starkly, the science and industry categories would blur. Nuclear narratives and industry collaborations Jeff Hughes described a ‘bomb historiography’ that tended to dominate accounts of nuclear physics: the early years of the discipline now shaped into a linear narrative of experiment and discovery leading to nuclear weapons.52 Collecting and interpretation at the Science Museum reflected this, although rather than weaponry the museum largely focused on the promise of atomic energy, reflecting government policy on what information was made public. Following the evacuation of most of the collections during the war, twelve galleries re-opened on 14 February 1946, including a special Science Exhibition.53 As part of this, Ward mounted displays on Atomic Energy and Uranium (Fig. 3). This included a sample of fused sand from, and photos of, the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test.54 Historical context was provided by items from the permanent collections including the Cockcroft-Walton apparatus. By the 1950s the Structure of Matter collection had become Atomic Physics; the wider coverage of matter outlined in Shaw and Ward’s schemes was now left to the Department of Chemistry and Photography.55 The focus of the collection was now even more firmly on atomic physics and suggests the beginning of a nuclear narrative. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The Atomic Energy and Uranium exhibition, 1946. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The Atomic Energy and Uranium exhibition, 1946. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Some collections previously falling under Electricity and Magnetism had also been adjusted, with a new designation for ‘Electron Physics including x-Rays’.56 In addition to reflecting the booming electronic industry, promotion of ‘Electron Physics’ to collection status seems to have been due to the success of the museum’s 1947 Electron Jubilee, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Thomson’s discovery. The exhibition, which combined objects with working demonstrations, ran from September 1947 to February 1948. During this period it attracted 143,431 visitors, with high demand for school tours and public lectures, as well as for the handbook, whose entire print run of 10,000 was sold.57 The Electron Jubilee exhibition was curated by the physics department’s assistant keeper David Follett (who had obtained his Ph.D. studying cosmic rays at Birkbeck College and then worked for Adam Hilger instruments).58 It was staged in association with the Institution of Electronic Engineers, and ‘made possible by the whole-hearted co-operation of firms and organisations concerned with the “electronics” side of electrical industry’.59 It focused heavily on applications of electron physics research: displays illustrated the principles of thermionic valves and cathode ray tubes, and their applications in radio and other fields. A section on The Electron as a Wave included a new acquisition, G. P. Thomson’s original electron diffraction photographs and camera, alongside a working exhibit of a modern electron diffraction camera for industrial uses. Thomson Senior’s cathode-ray tube, which he himself had displayed at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition as an example of pure physics research, was now the foundation stone of an industrial collection. The exhibition’s popularity drew attention to this object, leading to some worries over the primacy of one of the stars of the Science Museum’s collections: a few months after the exhibition T. W. Chalmers, consultant editor of The Engineer, wrote to Ward that the Cavendish Laboratory also claimed to have Thomson’s ‘discovery’ apparatus, suggesting that the Science Museum’s might be a tube from an earlier experiment.60 Follett and Ward’s further investigations proved inconclusive, and as Thomson’s description of his 1897 experiments uses one diagram to illustrate several different setups, it remains impossible to definitively identify any of his surviving tubes as the ‘discovery apparatus’ (which in any case probably never existed; multiple tubes were used across a series of experiments).61 The 1956 catalogue of the Cavendish Museum indicates that the ‘pure research’ approach to modern physics prevailed there: the working collections of professors from James Clerk Maxwell to Lawrence Bragg presented in series, the hero-memorial approach evident in the display of a desk which had been used by all of them.62 (This ‘museum of Cavendish physicists, for Cavendish physicists’ approach persisted after the laboratory moved to a new site in 1974; the collections were deliberately laid out along a corridor so that staff would regularly pass them).63 The new atomic physics collection continued to suffer from a lack of suitable permanent display space, with temporary exhibitions in South Kensington and elsewhere the main source of acquisitions over the next few decades. Through these, the museum developed a very close working relationship with the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (aere) at Harwell: its first director was Sir John Cockcroft, already linked to the museum from his Cavendish days. The museum was also a key venue for the aere’s public outputs. This close relationship with the aere and industry partners was reflected in the movement of objects: the museum made every effort to oblige its industrial partners with loans, while the curators used trade exhibitions and fairs as a way of sourcing objects for the collections. UK public displays largely mirrored the approach of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative to ‘displace public attention from the military to the benign atom’, promoting industrial research and stressing its applications in everyday life.64 Despite Ward’s lament that lending the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator to the aere for the 1949 British Industries Fair at Olympia was a most suitable idea ‘from all points of view except our own’, Cockcroft’s influence prevailed, and the apparatus was mounted on a rotating table high above the bench exhibits, making ‘one of the landmarks of the Grand Hall’.65 Ward ultimately turned the situation to the museum’s advantage, securing on permanent loan a model of the Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile (gleep), Harwell’s first experimental nuclear reactor, which had been exhibited at the fair. Over the next few years this model was regularly returned to the aere for exhibitions touring towns near new reactors: these couched nuclear work in a narrative of British discoveries from John Dalton onwards, promoting the safety of nuclear technologies.66 The collection grew with displays from the 1951 Festival of Britain, including animated reaction models inherited from the Exhibition of Science at South Kensington. Further examples of the latest nuclear technologies came from Ward’s visits to the 1955 Geneva exhibition, and 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.67 In early 1958, in response to reports of British success in achieving controlled nuclear fusion with Harwell’s Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly (zeta) reactor, the museum commissioned a scale model. Unfortunately, its delivery that May coincided with Cockcroft’s retraction of the fusion claims. However, the museum continued to describe zeta as ‘an apparatus which can fuse together atoms of heavy hydrogen, with the release of energy’.68 This sensitivity towards the atomic industry became increasingly marked in the decades following the war. The 1946 Atomic Energy displays show that it is not entirely the case that ‘official institutions such as the Science Museum eschewed all mention of the bomb’, as Sophie Forgan has argued in her survey of atomic science popularization in British exhibitions and print between 1945 and 1960.69 However, the museum’s approach did grow increasingly cautious. For the 1946 exhibition, the museum built a ping-pong ball model illustrating the uranium chain reaction, which was demonstrated twice daily in the Lecture Theatre. Its label and Ward’s notes for the demonstrators described it as an ‘atomic bomb model’ – but by 1947 Ward was describing the uranium reaction only as ‘utilized for the release of atomic energy’.70 The careful tone of the museum’s language continued for decades, largely at the behest of government bodies: Ward described the Ministry of Supply as ‘vetting’ his label text for reactor models during the 1950s, and as late as the 1980s the UK Atomic Energy Authority sought to change gallery label text which it deemed equivocal about the decision to drop the bomb on Japan.71 A more historical approach to collecting The post-war decades also saw a gradual shift towards a more historical approach by the Science Museum, mirroring the growth of history of science as a discipline (on which see Alberti’s paper in this issue).72 Although it is tempting to equate this with the tenure of Dr Frank Sherwood Taylor, the first trained historian of science to be appointed director of the Science Museum, his struggles with illness and the administrative load of running a large museum stymied his ambition and he died in post after only six years at the helm. A more substantial re-alignment towards history would be led by David Follett, whom we met earlier as curator of the Electron Jubilee exhibition.73 Follett, by now keeper of the Electrical Engineering department, was promoted to director in 1960; he pushed for the museum to expressly promote the history of science and industry, in contrast to previous directors’ practice of using historical series to help explain contemporary science and technology.74 Follett’s early ambitions for presenting the museum’s collections, laid out in a series of draft position papers, frequently referenced the ‘Two Cultures’ debate triggered by C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture. Follet remarked on ‘the gulf which is supposed to exist between the humanities and the sciences’ and argued that while this perception continued the Science Museum would fail to be recognized as one of the nation’s great cultural institutions.75 In his view bridging this gulf, or showing it to be non-existent, ‘might be regarded as one of our main aims when we consider the presentation of our Collections to the public.’76 For Follett, the way to bridge the gulf was to promote history more strongly; this would capitalize on trends in education circles that saw history of science as a convenient vehicle for a broader education about science.77 This would move away from what he considered ‘the dead hand of the Bell Committee’ gallery style of simple historical sequences presented as a natural evolution towards more recent apparatus.78 He proposed to retain historic series on display – not least as ‘historical material has an intrinsic glamour, frequently brings out principles in a simple way, and leads up satisfyingly to the display of the current situation in science and technology’.79 But now the collection would be treated as more than just an evolutionary sequence; interpretation of objects would show ‘if possible their relationship to contemporary social history’.80 Follett proposed to extend the historical mindset to collecting recent science and technology. For him, objects acquired to represent the current state of affairs were the historical collections of the future: ‘our successors in twenty-five years’ time will applaud or condemn us in the light of history in what we now acquire to represent the contemporary picture.’81 Following extensive discussions with his keepers, several new collections were outlined in January 1962.82 Space Technology, an area Follett deemed unique since ‘it has virtually no past but exists only in the present and in the future’ would be co-managed by the astronomy and engineering curators, in the absence of a single individual with obvious remit.83 A gradually growing collection of scale models seems to have been the solution to the difficulties of collecting original artefacts.84 Meanwhile, a new section on Basic Electronics was instigated to cover the historical development of devices such as the thermionic valve, photo-electric cell and cathode ray tube. ‘The pioneer apparatus of electron physics’ had already been returned to the Department of Physics the previous year, alongside the Electricity and Magnetism collections; Thomson’s cathode ray tube now ‘science’ once again rather than ‘industry’. Follett was conscious of the difficulties in assigning new collection areas to departments which had traditionally been organized in terms of use: ‘nuclear power as an example originates in Department 1 [Physics], it raises steam and drives turbines in Department 6 [Mechanical and Civil Engineering]; the turbines drive generators in Department 4 [Electrical Engineering and Communication] and propel ships in Department 3 [Transport and Mining]; the by-products, radioactive isotopes, turn up in radiology, which is of interest not only in medicine but in the field of non-destructive testing which concerns industry generally’.85 The solution for the time being was to expand Atomic Physics into ‘Atomic Physics and Nuclear Power’; Follett decreed that while nuclear energy was still a new field it was important to give visitors an overview, and the engineering aspects should sit within the physics department. In due course, when nuclear power was fully developed, it could be absorbed into the engineering classifications, alongside oil and coal.86 (Slightly less diplomatically, he had told Ward the previous November that once the ‘glamour’ of nuclear power had worn off, it could take its place with normal engineering).87 The shift towards history was only marginally reflected in the atomic physics collections. Ward’s approach to historicizing the collection seems to have relied on commissioned models rather than original artefacts: these included glass spheres to represent Thomson’s ‘plum pudding’ atom, and scale models of Cockcroft and Walton’s laboratory and Fermi’s atomic pile. Otherwise, most acquisitions followed Follett’s approach of collecting items with a view to them becoming of historical interest in future, including the Imperial College hydrogen bubble chamber (the first to operate in Europe), photographs of cern, and a model of the Calder Hall nuclear power station. Arguably atomic physics was still too young for a historical take, and Ward met Follett’s ambitions in his other curatorial areas, overseeing galleries on Time Measurement and Early Centuries of Physics.88 In 1969, shortly before retirement, Ward finally managed to open a permanent gallery of atomic physics, thirty-five years after his first attempt, although it was not the grand scheme he had imagined. A subsection of a new permanent gallery, called ‘Applied Atomic Physics’ opened in December 1966. This was supported by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (successor to aere) and largely based on the ukaea’s touring ‘Atoms at Work’ exhibits. In 1967 the atomic physics exhibits moved to join them. The period after Ward’s retirement seems to have grown relatively quiet: Alan Morton, who was recruited as Curator of Nuclear Physics in 1979 (largely with a view to updating the permanent gallery), found the displays ‘absolutely dire . . . a mixture of some historical relics, just displayed as historical relics in one corner’, alongside the remains of the Atoms at Work panels; the the gallery was so neglected that a representative from the ukaea had visited the museum to dust it.89 The collections now had a curator trained in the history of science: Morton had worked on 1930s nuclear physics and was an active member of the British Society for the History of Science.90 He aimed to add more historical context to the gallery than was evident in the previous iteration, and also to humanize the exhibits, self-consciously making use of photographs and broadening the story beyond what he saw as the museum’s narrow ‘progress of science’ approach.91 Collecting was driven with a view to stories to be told in the new gallery. Morton advocated that the Science Museum Library become a repository for microfilm copies of the American Institute of Physics Archive for the History of Quantum Physics; browsing these he learned of paraffin wax disks used by James Chadwick in his experiments leading to the discovery of the neutron and kept by one of his students, whom Morton tracked down in the United States to secure the objects for the Science Museum collections (Fig. 4). To Morton, while the disks were visually ‘the antithesis of what you want from a museum object . . . so banal’, they were emblematic of Chadwick’s legacy (Morton extended this to later work on the bomb and nuclear power, rather than narrowly to the 1932 experiments).92 An approach to Cyril Stanley Smith, whom Morton had met while on a visit to mit some years previously, led to the site passes which Smith had been allocated while working on the Manhattan Project.93 Keeping up with recent developments was aided by the opportunity to collect large items due to the museum’s acquisition of a storage facility in Wiltshire; the seemingly limitless space was rapidly filled by the curators.94 Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Curator Alan Morton, holding James Chadwick’s paraffin disks, and designer Jenny Clements in a publicity photograph for the Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Power gallery, 1982. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Curator Alan Morton, holding James Chadwick’s paraffin disks, and designer Jenny Clements in a publicity photograph for the Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Power gallery, 1982. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. The gallery generated some controversy, thanks to revelations by the Radical Science Collective that the museum’s director Margaret Weston had capitulated to demands by the funders, the ukaea, to change some of the gallery text.95 Whether due to caution, or the passage of time, these days Morton is inclined to dismiss the controversy with the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’.96 He is open that the ukaea’s representatives were ‘very much present’ in the development of the gallery, noting that in the 1980s the museum still tended to see itself as the face of the benign state with the ukaea an important player (alongside other industries such as coal).97 The government was gearing up for public consultation on a new type of reactor (the pressurized water reactor, pwr) and saw the Science Museum as a public forum for debate; the gallery featured a section on different types of reactor including the but at the ukaea’s insistence overt safety comparisons of reactor types were avoided.98 The ukaea also wished to avoid drawing out links between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Morton later discovered this may have been personal rather than corporate motivation: their main representative had been in Nagasaki shortly after the war.99 However, the museum’s small but important collection of artefacts meant that these could not be overlooked.100 Ultimately only one pwr would ever be built, at Sizewell, and today the spread of reactor types featured in the collection does not seem unbalanced when considered in isolation from the gallery (which closed in the early 2000s). Thus, industry events shaped collection interpretation for a time, but the stories of the existing collections were resistant to reshaping and in the long term the collection would outlast the controversy. For the 1997 centenary of Thomson’s discovery of the electron, the museum staged a small temporary exhibition. This was again funded by the ukaea, which was winding up operations (part would become British Nuclear Fuels Limited) and the atomic authorities were trying to position themselves as part of the wider energy landscape: looking forward rather than looking back was convenient for both the funder and a museum that was increasingly trying to position science as of relevance to present-day visitors’ everyday lives. Rather than interpret the cathode ray tube solely in terms of the 1897 experiments or the nuclear narrative, Morton’s celebrations had some echoes of the 50th anniversary approach, looking at electronics applications such as radio and television; this resulted in collecting a set of the first blue light emitting diodes.101 It was during research for the 1997 exhibition that Morton started looking into Thomson’s own presentation of the apparatus, knowing that the designation ‘electron’ had gained currency only some years after 1897. This led him to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition; Morton notes that the ‘pure science’ story was a seductive one, but one which he was determined to avoid in his own displays. The Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Power gallery also included coverage of two earlier exhibitions. These were Ward’s 1937’s Atom Tracks photographs, a ‘pure research’ take at a time when few scientists were anticipating the outcomes of atomic research, and the Atomic Scientists’ Association’s ‘Atom Train’, which had toured the UK in 1947–8.102 In the latter the displays were framed as a choice between using the power of the atom for good or evil, with a clear political agenda pushing for international controls of atomic energy.103 Morton hoped that covering these exhibitions might prompt visitors to look critically at the wider gallery displays around them. He doubts most visitors got the conceit, but as he notes of the gallery development, ‘we were trying to deal with a difficult topic, and museums aren’t easy places to deal with difficult topics’.104 Conclusions Sam Alberti has commented that ‘disciplinary fluidity in museums is paradoxical, given the inertia of material culture’; he refers to the particular inertia of material culture held within collections, created by each museum’s specific configurations of buildings, things and practitioners.105 As Robert Bud notes, the great national science collections such as those of the Science Museum have relied on proven narratives and metaphors throughout the twentieth century, and while collection meanings can be shifted through new historical approaches or by exploring the specificity of the history of particular objects, curators may consciously or unconsciously find themselves reacting to the original collection frameworks rather than creating them anew; there is a challenge in ‘bending established collections to our will’.106 In (or within) different institutions some collections may be more malleable than others, as shown by articles in this issue: a personal collector’s framing may persist or be overlooked, as with the National Maritime Museum collections described elsewhere in this issue by Richard Dunn and Megan Barford. Some collections are such loose assemblages that their original shape can be difficult to recover, as Rebekah Higgitt has found with the Royal Society. The very large collections of the Science Museum have shown considerable inertia: despite attempts to respond to changes in physics over the twentieth century by frequent re-ordering of collections departments, the creation of new collections to accommodate emerging fields of study which did not sit comfortably within the nineteenth-century museum classifications, and movement of key objects between collections, the core arrangement from the museum’s founding has largely persisted. As with other collections explored here, the Science Museum’s collections grew organically, following emerging areas of science and industry and the priorities of the curators, their contacts, and the museum’s funders (the latter often strongly linked to government). Decades of grand schemes for major overhauls of the physics collections which never came to pass show the difficulty of constructing synoptic histories of science and technology, especially when using collections which, as Jim Bennett has cautioned, have become historical with the passage of time rather than being consciously collected with a historian’s eye.107 Pragmatism and opportunism frequently outweighed philosophy in the laying out of the collections for display. Firstly, as to what constituted ‘modern physics’ so far as the national collections were concerned: from a range of areas this could potentially have covered, the Science Museum focused on atomic physics, playing to the strengths of the man who looked after those collections during their early decades, F.A.B. Ward, and retaining the museum’s longstanding intellectual split between science and industry. This also meant that a technology-focused museum could emphasize ‘the kinds of questions that could be asked of objects’: more theoretical branches of physics were difficult to represent by collections of apparatus.108 As the national museum, the Science Museum reflected the priorities of the state, and this can be seen in the constitution and presentation of the collections. Initially reflecting the governmentally-approved teaching categories of the nineteenth century, they gradually moved towards presentations for more general audiences, but developed a strong slant towards the promotion of British industry in the second half of the twentieth century; the more historically-focused approaches of David Follett and Alan Morton still had to acknowledge the priorities of government and funders. While the Science Museum throughout its existence has sought to tell stories of both science and industry, early framing of the collections along these separate lines has resulted in the material culture of the working worlds of twentieth-century physics being split across separate collection departments, generally displayed and stored in different parts of large buildings. The collections and their interpretation were frequently shaped by groups with which the curators interacted and the narratives those groups tended to tell: the domain of ‘physics’ often veering towards research-for-research’s-sake narratives, but the domain of ‘industry’ focusing on social and economic benefits of technologies. ‘Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Power’ was an unusual collection in that it blended both, due to the novelty – and indeed ‘glamour’ – of nuclear energy, earning the collection an unusual treatment in the 1960s. Having curatorial oversight across both aspects arguably assisted Alan Morton’s ambitions of situating the old atomic physics collections (founded from the Cavendish-influenced ‘Structure of Matter’ section) within a wider story of the profound social impacts of the nuclear atom. In recent years ‘Nuclear Physics’ and ‘Nuclear Power’ have become separate collections managed by the Science Museum’s science and engineering curatorial teams, but today this is a division in collection database administration only. The ease of cross-referencing electronic databases and a trend away from single-collection galleries allows curators to overcome the science-technology split of the nineteenth century and to use the full range of the museum’s collections to tell broader histories, as with the 2016 Mathematics gallery.109 Future interpretation of ‘modern physics’ can move beyond the atom-centric focus of the mid-twentieth century, or the ‘bomb historiography’ that may be an inherent risk of collections called ‘nuclear’.110 However, it is useful not to lose sight of the collection’s origins and the reasons for its limitations: exploring these sheds light not only on the history of the Science Museum, but on trends in the public presentation of the ‘new physics’. The case of Thomson’s cathode ray tube shows that museum objects may be peripatetic and regularly reinterpreted. However, we should consider Bud’s caution against considering individual artefacts in isolation from existing meaning-laden collections with their own histories, culture and uses; whether exploring an object’s past, or attempting new acquisitions or interpretations, we should bear in mind that ‘existing collections, like concepts, provide enduring frames’.111 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Alan Morton for his insights – verbal, published, and found throughout the object records – into the Science Museum’s modern physics collections. John Liffen has provided invaluable guidance in navigating the museum’s records. This paper has benefited from comments by Jon Agar and the convenors and participants of the 2018 Cain conference at the Science History Institute. Footnotes 1 H. Kragh, Quantum Generations: A history of physics in the twentieth century (Princeton, 1999). 2 R. Staley, Einstein’s Generation: The origins of the relativity revolution (Chicago and London, 2008). 3 I. Clarke, ‘Negotiating Progress: Promoting “modern” physics in Britain, 1900–1940’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester (2012). 4 I. Clarke, ‘How to manage a revolution: Isaac Newton in the early twentieth century’, Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 68 no. 4 (2014), p. 323. 5 It is difficult to list which objects were in Science Museum sub-collections at any given time; catalogues were published sporadically, and not for all collections. When objects were moved between collections, record cards (and later electronic entries) were simply shifted into different sets with previous designations overwritten. The object biography approach allows some investigation of collection movement, but it would be prohibitively time-consuming to do this for all objects. 6 R. Bud, ‘Understanding “contemporary collecting”: modern collecting at the Science Museum’, in Challenging Collections: Approaches to the heritage of recent science and technology, Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology vol. 11, ed. A. Boyle and J.-G. Hagmann (Washington, dc, 2017), pp. 50–67. 7 R. Bud, ‘Collecting for the Science Museum: constructing the collections, the culture and the institution’, in Science for the Nation: Perspectives on the history of the Science Museum, ed. P.J.T. Morris (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 250–72. 8 G.J.N. Gooday, ‘Guthrie, Frederick (1833–1886), chemist and physicist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11785, accessed 16 December 2017. 9 G.J.N. Gooday, ‘Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science 23 no. 1 (1990), pp. 25–51. 10 D. Stilwell, ‘Frederick Guthrie: a man of action’, Physics World 12 no. 11 (1999), p. 33; W. J. Harrison, ‘Guthrie, Frederick’ (1833–1886), scientific writer’, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 23, ed. L. Stephen and S. Lee (London, 1890), pp 374–5. 11 F. Bramwell, Report of Inter-dept. Committee on National Science Collections (1886), p. 19, Parliamentary Papers li.935. 12 Department of Science and Art, Catalogue of the Science Collections for Teaching and Research in the South Kensington Museum, part ii:Physics (London, 1894). 13 Aside from a record of a letter sent by director Festing to Thomson in late 1900, no correspondence regarding this loan has yet been found in the Museum or Thomson’s papers. 14 J. Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge, 2012). 15 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1909’, Science Museum Library and Archives [hereafter scm]. For citation convention regarding the Science Museum’s annual reports, see P.J.T. Morris (ed.), Science for the Nation: Perspectives on the history of the Science Museum (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. xxi-xxii. 16 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1912’, scm. 17 Bell Committee, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Science Museum and the Geological Museum (London, 1911), p. 4. 18 Bell Committee, op. cit. (note 17), p. 4. 19 X. Mazda, ‘The changing role of history in the policy and collections of the Science Museum, 1857–1973’, Science Museum Papers in the History of Technology 3 (1996). 20 For more on successive Directors’ interpretations of the Bell Committee recommendations see Mazda, op. cit. (note 19); A. Boyle, ‘“Not for their beauty”: instruments and narratives at the Science Museum, London’, in Scientific Instruments on Display, ed. S. Ackermann, R.L. Kramer, and M. Miniati (Leiden, 2014), pp. 37–60. 21 T. Scheinfeldt, ‘The first years: The Science Museum at war and peace’, in Morris, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 41–60. 22 H. Lyons, ‘A memorandum on the arrangement of the collections in the Science Museum, to serve as a basis for discussion’ (October 1922), p. 2, scm z183/1. 23 G. Gooday, ‘“Vague and artificial”: the historically elusive distinction between pure and applied science’, Isis 103 no. 3 (2012), pp. 546–54 24 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1923’, scm. 25 D. H. Follett, The Rise of the Science Museum under Henry Lyons (London, 1978), p. 99. 26 H. Lyons et al., ‘Schemes for development: Physical Phenomena 1923–1938’, scm ed79/118. 27 Ibid. 28 A. Q. Morton, ‘The electron made public: the exhibition of pure science in the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–5’, in Exposing Electronics, Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, ed. B. Finn (Lansing, mi, 2003), pp. 25–43. 29 Ibid. 30 Royal Society, British Empire Exhibition, Handbook to the Exhibition of Pure Science arranged by the Royal Society (London, 1924), p. 143. 31 J. Hughes, ‘Unity through experiment? Reductionism, rhetoric and the politics of nuclear science, 1918–40’, in Pursuing the Unity of Science: Ideology and scientific practice from the Great War to the Cold War, ed. H. Kamminga and G. Somsen (London and New York, 2016). 32 Royal Society, British Empire Exhibition, Phases of Modern Science: Published in connexion with the science exhibit arranged by a committee of the Royal Society in the pavilion of His Majesty’s Government at the British Empire Exhibition, 1925 (London, 1925). 33 Lyons et al., op. cit. (note 26). 34 V. E. Pullin et al., ‘Schemes for development: x-Rays, 1926–1937’, scm ed79/150. 35 Clarke, op. cit. (note 3) 36 D. C., ‘Appendix to the Science Museum Annual Report for 1970: Dr. F.A.B. Ward’ (1970). 37 Lyons et al., op. cit. (note 26). 38 ‘Nominal File: Bragg, W. L.’, scm 2113. 39 F. W. Aston to H. Lyons, 6 October 1927, scm 163. 40 ‘Nominal File: Walton, E.’, scm 1494. 41 J. Liffen, ‘Behind the scenes: housing the collections’, in Morris, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 273–93. 42 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1935’, scm. 43 D. Baxandall et al., ‘Schemes for development: Astronomy, 1925–1957’, scm ed79/118. 44 Communications with Louise Devoy, Curator of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (27 November 2017) and Tacye Phillipson, Senior Curator of Modern Physics, National Museums Scotland (12 February 2018). 45 P. Ball, ‘The power of the blackboard’, Physics World 30 no. 6 (2017), p. 32. 46 Communication with Sophie Waring, Curator of Modern Science, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (mhs), 2014–17 (28 November 2017). 47 J.-F. Gauvin, ‘Einstein’s Blackboard as a Mutant Object’, JFG Blog (2004),https://jfgauvin2008.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/einsteins-blackboard/, accessed 19 December 2017. 48 Clarke, op. cit. (note 3). 49 D. C., op. cit. (note 36). 50 The boundaries between physics and chemistry were fluid in the early decades of the twentieth century; Rutherford won the 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry but would later become strongly identified as a physicist. 51 Clarke, op. cit. (note 3). 52 J. Hughes, ‘Radioactivity and nuclear physics’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. v:The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, ed. M. J. Nye (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 350–74. 53 T. Parsons, ‘The Science Museum and the Second World War’, in Morris, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 61–89. 54 F.A.B. Ward to H. Shaw (13 July 1946), scm 6472/380/1. 55 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1940–51’, scm. 56 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1952’, scm. 57 Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1947’, scm. 58 Obituary: ‘Sir David Follett’, The Times, 13 May 1982, p. 14. 59 Ibid. 60 T. W. Chalmers to F.A.B. Ward (10 May 1948), scm z210/6/2. 61 J. J. Thomson, ‘Cathode rays’, Philosophical Magazine 5th ser. 44 no. 269 (1897), pp. 293–316. 62 University of Cambridge Department of Physics, Museum of the Cavendish Laboratory: An outline guide to exhibits (Cambridge, 1956). 63 I. J. Falconer, Apparatus from the Cavendish Museum (Cambridge, 1980). The corridor arrangement was told by Falconer to Boris Jardine and relayed to me in conversation on 25 October 2017. 64 J. Krige, ‘Atoms for peace, scientific internationalism, and scientific intelligence’, Osiris 21 (2006), pp. 161–81. 65 ‘Correspondence between F.A.B. Ward, Herman Shaw and aere’ (1948), scm 8555/1/1; Science Museum, ‘Annual Report for 1949’, scm. 66 These exhibitions will be the subject of a forthcoming paper. 67 W. P. Grove to A. Barclay, 13 October 1958, scm 8555. 68 F.A.B. Ward, Handbook of the Collection Illustrating Atomic Physics (London, 1963). 69 S. Forgan, ‘Atoms in wonderland’, History and Technology 19 (2003), pp. 177–96. 70 F.A.B. Ward, ‘A mechanical model illustrating the uranium chain reaction’, Proceedings of the Physical Society 59 no. 1 (1947), pp. 113–17. My thanks to Jean-Baptiste Gouyon for drawing this model to my attention. 71 F.A.B. Ward, Correspondence with W. E. Beard, Ministry of Supply (1952), scm 8555/5/2; A. Morton, Interview by Alison Boyle (30 November 2017). 72 A.-K. Mayer, ‘I have been very fortunate…’. Brief report on the bshs oral history project: ‘The history of science in Britain, 1945–65’, British Journal for the History of Science 32 no. 2 (1999), pp. 223–35. 73 Mazda, op. cit. (note 19). 74 Ibid. 75 D. H. Follett, ‘2nd Draft’, scm z183/2; D. H. Follett, ‘The presentation of the Museum’s collections’ (31 January 1961), scm z183/2. 76 Follett, op. cit. [Presentation] (note 75). 77 Follett, op. cit. [2nd draft] (note 75); Follett, op. cit. [Presentation] (note 75). 78 D. H. Follett, ‘Draft paper on future Museum policy’, scm z183/2. 79 Ibid. 80 Follett, op. cit. [Presentation] (note 75). 81 Ibid. 82 D. H. Follett, ‘Changes in classification of Museum collections’ (9 January 1962), scm z183/2. 83 Follett, op. cit. (note 78). 84 J.-B. Gouyon, ‘‘Something simple and striking’, Science Museum Group Journal 1 no. 1 (2014), doi http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/140105. 85 Follett, op. cit. (note 82). 86 Ibid. 87 D. H. Follett to F.A.B. Ward (29 November 1961), scm z183/2. 88 D. C., op. cit. (note 36). 89 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 90 A. Q. Morton, ‘The Neutrino and Nuclear Physics, 1930–1940’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1982); Morton, op. cit. (note 71). See Alberti’s paper in this issue regarding networks available to science curators. 91 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Liffen, op. cit. (note 41). 95 A. Morton, ‘Of physics and power: 50 years of nuclear exhibitions’, Annales historiques de l’électricité 9 (2011), pp. 13–26. 96 Morton, op. cit. (note 95); Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 97 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 98 L. Levidow and B. Young, ‘Exhibiting nuclear power: the Science Museum cover-up’, Radical Science 14 (1984), pp. 52–79. 99 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 100 Morton, op. cit. (note 95). 101 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 102 Morton, op. cit. (note 95). 103 C. Laucht, ‘Atoms for the people: the Atomic Scientists’ Association, the British state and nuclear education in the Atom Train exhibition, 1947–1948’, British Journal for the History of Science 45 special issue 4 (2012), pp. 591–608. 104 Morton, op. cit. (note 71). 105 S.J.M.M. Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, disciplines, and the Manchester Museum (Manchester and New York, 2009), p. 192. 106 R. Bud, ‘Embodied odysseys: relics of stories about journeys through past, present, and future’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 no. 4 (2013), pp. 639–42, at p. 642. 107 J. Bennett, ‘Museums and the history of science: practitioner’s postscript’, Isis 96 no. 4 (2005), pp. 602–8. 108 Alberti, op. cit. (note 105). 109 K. McCallum, ‘Mathematics, manifest: a review of Mathematics: the Winton Gallery at the Science Museum’, bshmBulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 33 no. 1 (2018), pp. 50–53. 110 Hughes, op. cit. (note 52). 111 Bud, op. cit. (note 106), p. 641. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Modern physics in the museumShaping a UK national collection in the twentieth century
JF - Journal of the History of Collections
DO - 10.1093/jhc/fhy037
DA - 2019-11-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/modern-physics-in-the-museumshaping-a-uk-national-collection-in-the-icTPNFfE2w
SP - 487
VL - 31
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -