Abstract
THE South Kensington Museum was first opened to the public on July 1, 1857, and the seventy-fifth anniversary is being marked at the Science Museum by a special exhibition of technical apparatus, etc., which will remain on view until October. The wonderful progress which has been made in all branches of science and technology is shown by exhibiting examples which were in use during the decade 1850–60 alongside the corresponding types which are in use to-day, and emphasising the contrast in the descriptive notices. Air, land, and water transport are represented, and the remarkable advances which have been made in mathematical instruments, lighting equipment, telegraphy, typewriters, sewing machines, marine engines, pumping machinery, stationary engines, metallurgy, and other fields are shown by actual examples or by scale models. The discovery of the first artificial dye by W. H. Perkin in 1856 provides a very striking example of the progress made in industrial chemistry when the products of that date are compared with those of the dyeing industry of to-day. Besides a type exhibit placed among the others of the exhibition, a much larger and more representative display of modern dyes and dyed materials has been arranged in Gallery 66 on the top floor of the Museum. A series of plans shows how the Gore Estate has been developed by the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition of 1851 during the past eighty years, from the original group of green fields to the great intellectual centre which it is to-day. Since the South Kensington Museum, now represented by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum, was established on the initiative of the Prince Consort, the attendance records total more than seventy-eight million, and about two million visits annually are still recorded.
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Anniversary of the Science Museum. Nature 130, 15 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130015a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130015a0
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