Curious Devices and Mighty Machines — exploring science museums
Review by John Durant
[W]hy bother with science collections at all? Alberti’s answer is: because objects tell stories. Wrapping up in his final chapter, he says, “we have found that by telling stories with objects, science museums can make a difference, provoking reflection and action to improve humanity’s lot”.
Samuel Alberti is Director of Collections at the National Museums of Scotland and author of several books about museums, including medical museums. Here, he introduces the world of science museums to general readers through an examination of their collections and the people who look after them. The book is based on Alberti’s wide experience of these institutions in (mainly) Europe and North America, as well as on a series of interviews with science museum professionals (including, in the interests of transparency, me).
The extensively illustrated book is an easy read, organised around history (“How Collections Came to Be”); acquisition (“Collecting Science”); care (“Treasures of the Storeroom”); exhibition (“Engaging Objects”); and — interestingly, a contemporary concern — advocacy (“Campaigning with Collections”). Anyone interested in what science museums are all about but unfamiliar with how they work will learn a great deal here — and not least, about the passion that drives curators to invest their professional lives in building, looking after and interpreting the material in their care. The book is, as Alberti freely confesses, “more personal polemic than academic analysis”.
Art museums hold objects that are of agreed cultural (and, often, monetary) value. History museums hold objects that richly inform the particular histories with which they deal. But scientific objects are not generally regarded as objects of great cultural or monetary value — as every science curator knows, much of their material is freely donated and some is saved from the scrapyard. For the most part, the history of science as an academic field has not really engaged closely with museum artifacts — as our author notes, “very few university-based historians of science and technology use museum objects in their publications”. So what, then, is the value of the collections in science museums?
This question haunts Curious Devices and Mighty Machines and Alberti’s answers reflect the changing preoccupations of the science museum field in recent years. A century and more ago, many science curators might have been inclined to claim that — properly arranged, and laid out according to systematic principles — their collections were a solid foundation for scientific research and instruction. But outside of the more significant natural history museums, which, as Alberti points out, still conduct research and teaching based around their collections, scientific research in the 20th and 21st centuries has mostly been conducted in academic and industrial laboratories, not science museums; and such scientific instruction as has been given in museums has been of the informal rather than the formal kind.
So, why bother with science collections at all? Alberti’s answer is: because objects tell stories. Wrapping up in his final chapter, he says, “we have found that by telling stories with objects, science museums can make a difference, provoking reflection and action to improve humanity’s lot”. The stories that science objects tell are not predetermined by the objects, they are not single or static, and they are not always or even primarily scientific. Thus, we learn that the Deutsches Museum’s “adorable” early-20th century Lanz Bulldog tractor originally took pride of place in a large Agriculture and Food Technology gallery, where presumably it stood for the impact of technology on food production. More recently, it has found itself part of a radically different, environmental story in that same museum, in a gallery on the Anthropocene. Changing times lead to changing curatorial preoccupations, and these lead to re-interpretation of objects in support of new stories.
In his Introduction, Alberti muses on the widespread appearance of models in science museums. Taking models to be replicas, and therefore by nature inauthentic, he tells us that their endemic presence in science museums is a reflection in part of the rarity and size of some techno-scientific objects. But his first example — the famous Crick/Watson model of the Double Helix in the collections of the Science Museum, London — gives the game away. The double helix model is not a replica, needed because DNA itself is too small to see with the naked eye. It is a working model, produced by Crick and Watson in order to test whether their stereochemical solution to the structure of DNA worked in three-dimensional detail. (Significantly, as soon as Crick and Watson had satisfied themselves that the stereochemistry worked, they lost interest in their model.) And so it is with many, perhaps most, models in science museums. Model-making is fundamental to a great deal of research and innovation, and for this reason, models can be every bit as authentic as original experimental devices, prototypes or manuscripts.
There is a deeper problem with Alberti’s account. His focus is on science museum collections but he explicitly embraces science centres — which generally do not have collections — in his analysis. It is not clear, at least to me, why he does this. A deeper analysis than Alberti provides here would quickly have revealed that original artifacts are not alone in their ability to carry significant stories. Hands-on interactives, multi-media experiences and much else besides can be made to carry stories.
So, the question arises: what science-related stories are museum objects particularly good at carrying? Much has been said and written about this and good answers are available but, because Alberti does not really grapple with this issue, the reader is sometimes at a loss to know why the objects that he very obviously loves are quite so special.
For all these limitations, this book is an engaging general introduction to the world of science museum collections.
John Durant is The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum, an Adjunct Professor in the Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT, and a Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard University. He was founding editor of Public Understanding of Science, 1992–97.
