Scientific Instrument Curators in Britain: Building a Discipline with Material Culture

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by National Museums Scotland Research Repository Alberti, S J M M (2018) Scientific instrument curators in Britain: building a discipline with material culture. Journal of the History of Collections (fhy027). ISSN 1477-8564 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhy027 Deposited on: 09 December 2019 NMS Repository – Research publications by staff of the National Museums Scotland http://repository.nms.ac.uk/ Journal of the History of Collections vol. 31 no. 3 (2019) pp. 519–530 Scientific instrument curators in Britain Building a discipline with material culture Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article-abstract/31/3/519/5077066 by National Museums Scotland user on 09 December 2019 Samuel J.M.M. Alberti From the mid-1960s a new breed of scientific instrument curators emerged in the United Kingdom. This small community of practice developed in parallel to but distinctly from the expanding generation of university historians of science and other cognate museum sub-professions. Presenting the trajectories, experiences and practices of personnel in British scientific instrument collections, especially the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, this article explores how networks of interest around collections shaped the museum sector in later twentieth-century Britain. With particular objects – especially eighteenth-century instruments – the ‘brass brigade’ built a discipline. On 3 September 1968, sixty curators and other The museum professionals present at the ‘Aspects’ historians gathered at the Royal Scottish Museum meeting formed part of a distinct cohort emerging at in Edinburgh to discuss ‘Aspects of Eighteenth- this time. My aim in this paper is to understand the Century Astronomy’. Papers were delivered by development of this professional community from a ‘Dr. M. A. Hoskin, University of Cambridge; museum perspective. Other authors in this special issue Dr A. J. Meadows, University of Leicester; D. J. illuminate science collections by revealing their prov- Bryden, Royal Scottish Museum; Dr. E. G. Forbes, enance (for example, Richard Dunn) or by exploring University of Edinburgh; Lt. Cdr. H. D. Howse, their original discipline of use (Karin Tybjerg and National Maritime Museum; and G. L’E. Turner, Alison Boyle); here I want to show the importance of Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.’1 The the communities who cared for them once they were meeting was organized by David Bryden, who was in museum collections. History of science in UK two years into his first job, and indeed many of those museums, it transpires, developed in parallel with its present were at the beginning of their career, in new equivalent in universities, as well as with important posts or newly in-post. but overlooked connections with industrial archaeolo- This youthful energy was focused on the historic gists, collectors and dealers. telescopes in the special exhibition that catalyzed I will trace the roots of this group of science cura- the meeting. Scientific instruments were front-and- tors – by which I mean historic instrument curators, for centre; we might assume that they always had been reasons I will discuss – back to the early 1960s, which and always would be. But the happy admixture at this marked the beginning of expansion in both muse- meeting belied a complex and changing network of ums and universities in Britain. This will be my geo- interests around material culture that spanned muse- graphic focus, although it will widen as the networks ums, universities and beyond. Bryden, Turner and they formed extended internationally in the early Howse crafted different professional identities to 1980s. I begin by outlining the institutions, collec- those of their friends Hoskin, Meadows and Forbes. tions and personnel involved in this small but prolific Professional communities in museums, this paper community, before expanding my focus to relevant will show, are peculiar. They have their training, pub- museological, intellectual and organizational contexts. lications and networks; and most of all, a particular I then consider the relationship between curatorial relationship with the things in their care. They build practices – exhibiting, publishing and collecting – and disciplines with material culture. the construction of expertise. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/jhc/fhy027 Advance Access publication 21 August 2018 SAMUEL J.M.M. ALBERTI Like museologist Helen Wilkinson, I want to the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company. By understand how the practices of informal groups and this time the National Maritime Museum had been networks of interest around collections shaped the established in Greenwich and opened to the public 2 museum sector in later twentieth-century Britain. in 1937. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article-abstract/31/3/519/5077066 by National Museums Scotland user on 09 December 2019 For science curators, I argue that the 1960s and 1970s For science collections, as for others, however, much were a hinge point in the making of collective identi- of what shapes museum collections and communities ties. This was partly a response to the lack of object happens beyond their geneses, founding figures, and use by (other) historians of science – even including early years. The 1960s in particular saw a step-change those present at the ‘Aspects of Astronomy’ meeting. in practices and personnel; they marked the arrival of What, then, were the distinct approaches and out- a close-knit group of specialized curators who would looks of this new generation of curators – and how did set the intellectual path of these institutions as much they use historic scientific instruments to develop a as (if not more than) those who founded them. professional identity? For the first two curators in question, curating was a second career, and they brought with them the zeal of the converted. After distinguished service in Curators the Second World War and Korean War, Lieutenant- In the 1960s there were five main collections of scien- Commander H. Derek Howse joined the National tific instruments in the UK: the Science Museum in Maritime Museum in 1963 as Assistant Keeper under London; the National Maritime Museum in nearby David (‘Willie’) Waters, another naval commander Greenwich; the university collections in Oxford turned historian.4 The museum was in the process and Cambridge; and the only one outside southern of absorbing the old Royal Observatory and its tele- England, that of the Royal Scottish Museum (RSM) in scopes (the astronomers having escaped to the clearer Edinburgh.3 Although all will feature in what follows, skies of Sussex). Howse worked to restore and display the latter will play a disproportionately large role; astronomical instruments in the newly-vacated obser- partly because it has not had such sustained historical vatory. With no formal university education, he would attention as the others, and partly because the trajec- go on to be a prolific historian of navigational and tories and networks of the personnel there connected astronomical instruments: as one colleague observed, them to these other sites. he and Waters ‘gave weight’ to instrument curation.5 These collections had been institutionalized in Within months of Howse’s appointment, after a the first half of the century. With roots in the 1850s brief career in crystallography and a spell studying Industrial Museum of Scotland, the RSM Technology history of science, microscope enthusiast Gerard Department had been established in 1901, when a new L’Estrange Turner took up a similar post at the ‘Science Gallery’ opened. Soon afterwards in London Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.6 The the Science Museum became an entity separate from following year his colleague, linguist and archaeolo- the South Kensington Museum in 1909, its collection gist Francis Maddison, was promoted from Assistant of instruments crystallized around the 1876 Loan Curator to succeed C. H. Josten as Curator. Turner did Collection and the contents of the Patent Museum. not see eye-to-eye with his new boss, who operated for In Oxford, zoologist and historian Robert T. Gunther the most part in an overlapping but different network arranged a display of historic apparatus in the Bodleian to that mentioned here.7 Turner therefore turned his Library in 1919, then facilitated Lewis Evans’s dona- attention outwards, into external networks and pub- tion of early instruments to the University. This was lishing, especially around the history of microscopy. the core of the museum opened in the Old Ashmolean He produced over 100 papers by the time he retired building in 1925, curated by Gunther; it was formal- thirty years later, and played a leading role in several ized as the Museum of the History of Science in 1935. organizations, as we shall see below. In Cambridge too, following Gunther’s survey of sur- Turner’s early teaching at Oxford had a significant viving historic instruments across the university, a impact on one post-graduate student in particular: temporary display in 1936 was followed by a major David Bryden, who went on to take up the second of donation in 1944 that formed the core of a history of two assistant keeperships filled in rapid succession at science museum – from Robert Whipple, director of the RSM in 1966, after aviation engineer Don Storer.8 520 SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENT CURATORS IN BRITAIN Within Bryden’s vague remit were historic instru- Cavendish Laboratory from central Cambridge to ments, including glassware used by the renowned expand the museum in its wake. chemist Joseph Black.9 But it felt to him that he was Bryden would later move on to the library of the the first historian of science at theRSM : the library Science Museum, where history of science was Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article-abstract/31/3/519/5077066 by National Museums Scotland user on 09 December 2019 did not have a history of science classification, and increasingly encouraged after the War and which was the instruments had been overshadowed by indus- in the throes of expansion.

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