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In 1860, renowned natural philosopher (now referred to as a ‘scientist’ or, more specifically in the case of Clerk Maxwell, a ‘physicist’) James Clerk Maxwell wrote ‘Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk ♂ [male] to a Telegraph Clerk ♀ [female]’ (Harman, 2001).[1] The short poem was a slightly tongue-in-cheek ode to the romance of the electric telegraph littered with references to manufacturers of batteries used in electrical telegraphy around this time such as John Daniell, Alfred Smee, and William Grove and electrical units (now SI derived units) such as Ohm, Weber, Farad and Volt (Mills, 1995). Although intended as slightly tongue-in-cheek, Maxwell’s short ode can be read as a state of play of electrical telegraphy as it stood in 1860 when Britain dominated the limited undersea electrical telegraph network as it existed at the time and continued to do so as the network expanded to a global interconnected electrical network by the end of the nineteenth century. Figure 1 Colour photograph of of a letter opener with a an 1894 calender and world map © Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library Science Museum object 2004-162, Letter opener with 1894 calendar and map, made for the Eastern Telegraph Company, 1893–1894. Object is currently on display in cable section of the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum, London DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/191201/012 full size print This sixteen-line poem was but one from a lifetime of poetry on the part of Clerk Maxwell – many exploring the wonders and romance of the new age of electrical telecommunications through which Clerk Maxwell lived and to which he actively contributed. Three years earlier in September 1857, Maxwell had also written a poem about the failed transatlantic telegraph cable, The song of the Atlantic Telegraph Co.[2] It would not be until 1866, nearly a decade after the failure of the initial 1857 transatlantic cable, that the first successful commercial transatlantic telegraph cable was laid and by the end of the nineteenth century a vast network of telegraph cables connected the furthest corners of the globe.[3] By this time, an extended telegraph network led to decreased costs and the telegraph became a more accessible and everyday form of communication. It was the romance, possibility, and personal use of the telegraph which caught the popular imagination, and these aspects began to be featured in popular literature in the late Victorian age – as they had been, in a more technical form, in Clerk Maxwell’s original 1860 poem above (Bruton, 2015). Below I have used artefacts from the Science Museum Group’s extensive holdings relating to the history of electrical telegraphy – many on display in the Information Age gallery at the Museum – to engage with both the technology and romance of the early years of electrical telegraphy.[4] In this article, I explore, situate and contextualise the technology – the material culture and early technical standards – as well as the human aspect – the romance and promise – of electrical telegraphy referred to in Clerk Maxwell’s poem above.

This article will consider the alignment of scientific and media practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over several decades after 1817 certain instrument makers began to specialise in the domestic entertainment market, transferring skills from optical instrument manufacture to the design of fashionable novelty devices. The instrument trade was expanding into a new middle-class market to exploit an increasing popular trade in optical novelties, exemplified by the 1817 Kaleidoscope craze and new interest among the middle classes for microscopes, telescopes, and magic lanterns. This paper will address this shift towards more popular uses of scientific instruments and optical toys. In particular it will address the involvement of the Birmingham and London optician Philip Carpenter in three popular media formats of the 1810s and 1820s — the 1817 patent Kaleidoscope, 1821 Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern and 1827 Microcosm.

In May 2014, Latin America was the stage for the 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference (PCST 2014). It was the first time that this important international conference had reached the region since its launch in 1989, and it provides a good opportunity to discuss science communication in Latin America. The region is huge and extraordinarily diverse. As such, this article is only the starting point of a conversation on the subject: here the author presents an overview of the field in the region, highlighting some of the landmarks and discussing some challenges faced.

This essay is an account of the making of England and her Soldiers (1859) by Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale. The book is a literary account of the Crimean War, written by Martineau and based on Nightingale’s statistical studies of mortality during the conflict. Nightingale was passionate about statistics and healthcare. Whilst working as a nurse in the Crimea, she witnessed thousands of soldiers die of infectious diseases that might have been prevented with proper sanitation. After the war, she launched a campaign to convince the British government to make permanent reforms to military healthcare, compiling a dataset on mortality in the Crimea. She worked with the government’s Royal Commission investigating healthcare during the war, but also worked privately with Martineau to publicise her findings. Martineau and Nightingale grasped that the lay reader was more receptive to statistical information in a literary format than in dense statistical reports. As such, Nightingale’s data was interwoven with Martineau’s text. The pair illustrated their book with Nightingale’s ‘Rose Diagram’, a statistical graphic which simply illustrated the rate of mortality.

In 2010, Stephen Hawking commented that, “Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.” This is not a connection we might readily make in the modern world. Science is technology, laboratories, facts and figures. It is experiment, cold, hard evidence, and equally cold, hard environments. Yet, visitors to the Science Museum Group’s museums (and readers of the Science Museum Group Journal) know that this is not the case. Many have recently stood in awe at the Soyuz TMA-19M descent module that brought Tim Peake and colleagues back to Earth from the International Space Station, cowed by the fragility, complexity and humanity of such an object: its romance. Indeed, Hawking was talking about sending astronauts on dangerous missions when he spoke about romance. Although unmanned space flight was perfectly possible at the time, and eliminated the risk to human life, he believed that human participants were a fundamental part of the endeavour. The exploration, the adventure and the risk were essential. There is romance in the stars that inspires humans to advance, but a romance that technology devoid of human connection cannot convey. Yet, technology also has its own romance. There is a nostalgia, an emotional pull, to technologies that we have known and spent time with over the course of our lives. Technologies facilitate romance – the phone call, the dating app, the email, the letter, the train journey, the meal, the contraceptive pill. Technologies open a new world of experience to us, whether through travel, enhanced vision, means of recording, or display. But technologies can also be ‘romanticised’, over-simplified into a black box that masks realities of labour, discrimination, resource exploitation or environmental damage. This complex relationship, as well as the sheer variety of what we might consider technology, or romance, to be was investigated as part of a collaboration between the Science Museum Group, Central Saint Martins, and eeodo publishing in 2018, and is further developed in the papers that make up this mini collection.

This article builds on previous literature on museums and material culture by presenting an examination of the changing stories that a particular object — a rebuilt version of Douglas Hartree’s Differential Analyser — has been used to tell in the Science Museum, London. The analogy of ventriloquism is introduced to explore the ways that the object has been presented and interpreted in the Museum. It is used to illuminate how objects can carry the various meanings, interests, and prejudices (conscious and unconscious) of the human actors involved in their creation, collection and display. The article describes how the voices ‘ventriloquised’ through Hartree’s rebuilt ‘Trainbox’ have imbued this later version of the machine with the physical and instrumental functions of the original Analyser to make the object ‘fit’ with varying stories of computation, differential analysis, and models. The paper argues that the voices ventriloquised through the Trainbox have turned the object into the ‘material polyglot’ that sits in the Information Age gallery of the Science Museum today. The article concludes with the question of whether we can truly understand how objects change at the ‘hands-on’ level in museums, without including the simultaneous stories that an object shares with its audiences.

The curators of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries reflect on their experiences of creating these significant new displays at the Science Museum in London. After summarising the historical medical displays at this museum, they outline the curatorial concepts behind their respective new galleries to explore the display strategies and processes behind the development of the new exhibits and highlight the significance of some of the objects that visitors can encounter today.

Long term and bulk patterns in both the accessioning and deaccessioning of the Science and Technology collections of National Museums Scotland were revealed within their digital database records. This makes use of bulk analysis of records to show historic patterns which can inform current activities. The current and recent selection of collections for display is analysed to reveal patterns in when these objects came into the collection. The research confirms the value of both past collecting and disposal in the development of strong collections of present and future utility. It shows that both recent displays and a major mid-twentieth century re-assessment of the collection were most likely to value material which had been recently collected. It also reveals a potential tendency for less significant material to be acquired by gift than by purchase.

This article examines the digital media revolution as a revolution reliant upon a sustained legacy of colonial violence in regions such as the Congo, the locale of this study. Contemporary production is foreshadowed by the industrial genocide of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries visited upon the Congo by Belgium. In an era defined by globally distributed trade networks, colonialism is equally distributed and mercurial – its complex supply chains obfuscating responsibility toward either the environment or its human inhabitants. The paper looks at the minerals required for latter day digital devices which have become the latest iteration of conflict in the region. Minerals are traced through a number of modern technologies including matches, atomic clocks and mobile devices, all of which evoke alchemical transformation and spectacle. We trace the legacy of colonial violence through smartphones, as the contemporary epitome of technical supremacy – highlighting their qualities of immediacy, mobility and making the remote proximate, especially by bringing remotely sourced geological elements into everyday use. Moving away from our own techno-romantic affiliation with such commodities, the article highlights the fact that focus on effect often further obfuscates the causal factors and consequences of resource extraction in commodity production. Even as we summon stories of global trade with our fingertips on mobile, networked devices, we are implicated in these cycles of violence.

How did industrial museums cross the Atlantic? When the first American museums of science and industry were created in the 1920s, they looked to Europe in order to import what was seen at that time as a burgeoning cultural institution. In this article, I look at this process of appropriation through an analysis of the changing perceptions of European industrial museums as expressed in the reports, surveys and books written by the curators, directors and trustees of the New York Museum of Science and Industry. I will pay particular attention to the 1927 film Museums of the New Age, documenting the main national industrial museums in Europe, and to a 1937 report on the techniques of display at the Palais de la Découverte. I will argue that their contrasting assessment of European industrial museums, which in only ten years ceased to be seen as cathedrals of a new age to become old-fashioned storehouses, is symptomatic of the significant transformation of museums of science and industry as cultural institutions during the 1930s in the United States.

A transition from the fossil-fuel driven to a sustainable energy system is an enormous global challenge: climate change and finite resources require countries all over the world to change their way of producing, transporting and using energy. The Energiewende (energy transition) will require major changes in the current energy supply system in Germany – but also worldwide. These changes will not only affect the technical sector but will also include ecological questions, social issues and political matters. Whether any transition is going to favour large scale solutions or decentralised technologies depends on local situations and global interconnections, and above all on a democratic process. Hence energy transition succeeds or fails with the acceptance and participation of society. To deal with this overwhelmingly complex topic and its multi-layered dependencies, the Deutsches Museum has designed an exhibition providing visitors with background knowledge about the necessities and challenges of energy transition, unpicking the links between the different technical, economic and social challenges. The exhibition accomplishes the task with an engaging and facilitating approach while taking into account the highly emotive aspects of energy transition as a societal issue. This paper presents the concept of the travelling exhibition energie.wenden, relating it to the Deutsches Museum´s tradition of exhibitions as well as to the challenge of how to deal with socio-scientific topics in scientific exhibitions.

This article looks at the relationship between two very popular middle-class activities in Late Victorian Britain, photographing and cycling, and explores the influence that the new technology of physical mobility had on visual experiences and related photographic practices. It focuses, in particular, on the significance that new practices of mobility and visuality had for a growing body of amateur photographers as they negotiated these experiences as a temporality of late nineteenth century modernity. Drawing on the everyday historical experiences of cycle and photography users as these were articulated at the time, the article offers new insight into the role that such body-machine interactions had on the development of what was, effectively, a modern, moving, gaze. My argument is that the sense of control over the new ways of moving and seeing enabled by cycling contributed to shape a new visual self and that, in turn, this fuelled the desire for a new visual language and means of representation that could challenge dominant photographic practices, in a manner that foresees the emergence of snapshot photography.

In autumn 2019 the Science Museum will open its new Medicine Gallery, which is an opportunity to redisplay and reinterpret items from the collection. One object selected as a centrepiece for the new space is the Giustiniani Medicine Chest, which dates from the mid-sixteenth century. This object came into the Science Museum Collection in 1946 having originally been bought in Italy in 1924 by an agent of Sir Henry Wellcome for his medical collection. This article assesses its provenance and history.

The Hugh Davies Collection (HDC) at the Science Museum in London comprises 42 items of electronic sound apparatus owned by English experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005), including self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments and modified sound production and manipulation hardware. An early proponent of ‘live electronic music’ (performed live on stage rather than constructed on magnetic tape in a studio), Davies’s DIY approach shaped the development of experimental and improvised musics from the late 1960s onwards. However, his practice has not been widely reported in the literature, hence little information is readily available about the material artefacts that constituted and enabled it. This article provides the first account of the development of Davies’s practice in relation to the objects in the HDC: from the modified electronic sound apparatus used in his early live electronic compositions (among the first of their kind by a British composer); through the ‘instrumental turn’ represented by his first self-built instrument, Shozyg I (1968); to his mature practice, where self-built instruments like Springboard Mk. XI (1974) replaced electronic transformation as the primary means by which Davies explored new and novel sound-worlds. As well as advancing knowledge of Davies’s pioneering work in live electronics and instrument-building and enhancing understanding of the objects in the HDC, this article shows how object biographic and archival methodologies can be combined to provide insight into the ways in which objects (instruments, technologies) and practices shape each other over time.

In 2008 Rijksmuseum Boerhaave organised an exhibition on the occasion of the centennial of the liquefaction of helium by Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden. Quest for Absolute Zero was the first major temporary exhibition aimed at new target groups. Therefore the focus was on the human scale and the colourful story behind the ‘man of Absolute Zero’. The fierce competition with James Dewar from the Royal Institution was also highlighted. The outcome of Quest for Absolute Zero was extremely positive for Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in terms of visitor numbers, media coverage, collaborations and side events. The project also proved to be a very useful lever for the renewal of the permanent exhibition, scheduled to open in December 2017.

Science centres and museums in Europe traditionally offer opportunities for public participation, such as dialogues, debates and workshops. In recent years, starting with the support of grants from the European Commission, the purpose of these initiatives is increasingly more connected with the policy making processes where science centres play a role as brokers between the public and other stakeholders. This article begins an investigation on how these two levels of participation – the participation of museums in policy, and the participation of visitors in museums – are related in seven European science centres and museums. The results suggest that science centres and museums are regarded by their visitors as potential platforms to facilitate public participation in policy, especially in countries where the general infrastructure for public participation in science is weak.

Contagious Cities was a cultural project that explored how urban environments in different parts of the world have coped with infectious diseases. Its theme of how populations prepare for and deal with epidemics is a core strategic concern for Wellcome – the large health and medicine foundation behind the project. Thoroughly interdisciplinary in their approach, the variety of exhibitions, events and other cultural activities the project supported placed a special emphasis on the illuminating potential for artists to investigate medical, scientific and social phenomena. The initiative also drew inspiration from Wellcome’s track record of curating interdisciplinary projects in its own museum in London, and approached its international ambitions (in Geneva, New York, Hong Kong and Berlin) through partnership and co-production. This article looks back at this unusual project, which ironically was concluded just before the world plunged into the current pandemic. The emphasis here, however, is somewhat less on the project’s themes – the fascinating and frightening implications of human co-existence with microbes in crowded contexts. Instead, we have focused on the complexities of working with multiple stakeholders in very different contexts, and we reflect on Wellcome’s role as an experienced, knowledgeable and creative, but also powerful and well-funded partner cum commissioner.

This essay explores the extent to which residues of the practices inherent in nineteenth-century science lecture-demonstrations from the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) are evident in contemporary forms of Science Museum Group (SMG) Explainer presentations. The discipline of Performance Studies offers a number of models to discuss such a consideration and this essay draws particularly on the connected, transgenerational theories of vertical transmission, embodied knowledge and intertheatricality. Specifically, the focus is on three notable scientists, selected here for their particular influence on the lecture-demonstration practices at the RI during the nineteenth century: Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and John Tyndall. It suggests that aspects of their embodied performances in the lecture theatre have been transmitted through subsequent generations of RI practitioners. Extending this transmission, via specific events in 1954 that led to Science Museum Guide Lecturers observing RI practices, it suggests that these practices were then inherited and passed down through generations of lecturing and explaining staff at the museum.

Review

The Airy Transit Circle defined the position of the Greenwich Prime Meridian for decades. A set of models depicting the celebrated instrument and its parts was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855. After the exhibition, the models were transferred for display at the South Kensington Museum, where it remained until it was deaccessioned in 1928. The article investigates why the set of models were seen as ‘mysterious’ in both Paris and London, despite being the instrument that marked Longitude Zero for the British Empire, and why such a prestigious instrument failed to capture the public imagination. This is shown by highlighting the contradictory interpretations of the models by the various networks of individuals and institutions within which they were discussed and transmitted.

Framing ‘science and society’ as a conflict has diverted us from more important problems. Our economic environment urges the commercialisation and social acceptance of new technologies, and science communicators and their publics contribute work to these ends. These activities neglect existing, uncontroversial technologies that, in a collaboration between responsible scientists and their publics, could be deployed to address global problems.

Book review: 'The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboration, Natural Philosophy, and the Improvement of the Steam Engine', by David Philip Miller, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

This paper locates the development of a science and technology museum within the history of the predominantly object-based Vienna Museum, which was founded early in the twentieth century. It portrays interactive engagement with young people in terms of its continuity with the aim of popularising science, which had been a founding principle of the museum. At the same time, this paper examines the way in which the rise of interactivity represented a radical shift from an emphasis on technology itself towards a focus upon scientific principles, a phenomenon which in turn had an influence upon enquiry-based learning.

Opened in November 2019, Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries showcases four major new art commissions at the Science Museum, London. This article brings artistic and curatorial voices to reflect on their meaning, as Curator of Art Collections, Katy Barrett, talks with artists Eleanor Crook, Marc Quinn, and Sophie Nielsen and Rolf Knudsen of Studio Roso. They consider the process of producing the works, what they were inspired by and what is different about working in a medical or science context. This allows Barrett to reflect on all four commissions, how they fit into the history of art at the Science Museum, what they bring to the Museum’s collections, and what can be learnt from art in looking at and understanding science.

Medical photography collections often remind us of the inescapable reality of human suffering and pain, and at the same time they oblige us to deal with questions of ownership and privacy. Medical photography collections are thus considered ‘sensitive’ collections within the museum context. This essay investigates privacy issues involved in the curating of historical photographic collections in museum spaces. When medical photography entered into non-medical domains privacy issues emerged. It is these privacy issues that cast a shadow of sensitivity on the medical material. But the relationship between clinical photograph collections and museums is not as straightforward as it may seem. Personal pictures involve power and privacy, and both aspects play a role in the public display of historical medical photographs, often in unexpected ways.

The last decade in Ireland has seen rapid societal change, including the enshrining of equal marriage and women’s right to bodily autonomy in the constitution via public referendum. In response, the National Museum of Ireland enacted a programme of collecting the material culture of such significant contemporary events in Ireland, which led to the formal establishment of the Contemporary Ireland Collection. The material culture of the referendum on the abolishment of the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution (Repeal the 8th) to allow for the legal termination of pregnancy formed the nucleus of the collection, and the rationale behind the identification of the representative themes and subsequent object choices has become the template on which further contemporary collecting is now based. This has enabled the institution and its curators to work collaboratively with the public in the expansion of its collections to fill the historic gaps and become more inclusive and representative of Ireland’s varied and difficult history.

When the Crystal Palace at Sydenham opened in 1854, the extinct animal models and geological strata exhibited in its park grounds offered Victorians access to a reconstructed past – modelled there for the first time – and drastically transformed how they understood and engaged with the history of the Earth. The geological section, developed by British naturalists and modelled after and with local resources was, like the rest of the Crystal Palace, governed by a historical perspective meant to communicate the glory of Victorian Britain. The guidebook authored by Richard Owen, Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World, illustrates how Victorian naturalists placed nature in the service of the nation – even if those elements of nature, like the Iguanodon or the Megalosaurus, lived and died long before such human categories were established. The geological section of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which educated the public about the past while celebrating the scale and might of modernity, was a discursive site of exchange between past and present, but one that favoured the human present by intimating that deep time had been domesticated, corralled and commoditised by the nation’s naturalists. Initially, the claim that extinct animals were aligned with British national heritage was a construction that matched the agenda of the Crystal Palace Company. Over time, the extinct animal models themselves (rather than the animals they represented) became historical artefacts recognised as heritage assets.

The history of nineteenth-century spectacles and eyeglasses is unusual in the extent to which it has incorporated objects and material evidence. However, both collectors and historians have favoured the pristine object or the object with noteworthy providence at the expense of more utilitarian frames. By drawing upon my experience as a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) student at the Science Museum, this article reflects on how large anonymous and primarily uncatalogued collections can be fruitfully used in historical research. By case-studying the retail and design of vision aids, it argues that everyday or anonymous objects – the broken, scratched, un-named – are a valuable historical source. It highlights the usefulness of material culture for exploring the experiences of use or of users that otherwise leave little trace and proposes how problems of interpretation can be overcome through the study of a range of additional sources: business records, trade catalogues, advertising material, imagery, popular literature and medical literature. Whilst researching an anonymous collection is labour-intensive, the material evidence of utilitarian and noteworthy spectacles and eyeglasses allowed the experience of nineteenth-century vision aid wear and vision testing to be fully explored and communicated to both an academic and non-academic audience.

The first outside broadcast ever made by the British Broadcasting Company from a natural location was the Nightingale broadcast of 19 May 1924, in which the world-famous virtuoso cellist Beatrice Harrison performed a ‘duet’ with nightingales in her garden. The broadcast was made possible by the Marconi-Sykes magnetophone, an improved microphone developed for the early BBC. This paper explores the historical and cultural significance of the Nightingale broadcasts, with a particular emphasis on the emotive aspects, and explains the role of the magnetophone in this context. This paper was inspired by two recent acquisitions by the National Media Museum, two magnetophones donated by the BBC in 2012, and the personal archive of Captain A G D West, the BBC engineer who coordinated the first Nightingale broadcast, donated by his descendants in 2015.

Focusing on the experience of working with Russia’s cultural, industrial and political sectors, this paper investigates how the development of new contacts and partnerships has contributed not only to the loan of material of historic significance to the Science Museum’s exhibition, but more broadly changes perceptions about Russia and its space programme in the western world. Addressing the multiple challenges involved – legal, political and security, among others – it reveals the importance of many of the space objects themselves as well as demonstrating how the Science Museum has helped to maintain a dialogue with Russia even during the most testing times. In September 2015 the Science Museum opened the most ambitious special exhibition it had ever undertaken: Cosmonauts: birth of the space age. Whilst the creation of a ‘blockbuster’ exhibition might be the normal expectation of a great art museum, the fact that a science museum should undertake such an endeavour is equally worthy of comment, and this article seeks to illustrate the exceptional curatorial, museological, logistical, legal and political hurdles that this project had to overcome. Indeed, they would astonish even the grandest and most experienced of the international art museums. Art museums are delighted when they can display the acclaimed works of Monet, but even the most valuable paintings cannot be said to be have been official state secrets in the way that so much Russian space technology has been. The curatorial team kept its nerve because of a compelling sense that while the project delivery was high stress, the intellectual rewards would be considerable, and especially the opportunity to present a story of human endeavour in which cultural and scientific excellence are so intertwined. When the project team started out they could never have anticipated that they would be seeking to deliver an audacious exhibition set against a background of very serious strains in the UK-Russia relationship. In the end, they learned a great deal about Russia itself and the importance of sustaining cultural dialogue.

The essay explores the process of curating Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, an exhibition held at Wellcome Collection from May 2019 until January 2020. The exhibition brought together two artists of different generations who explored the representation of illness and care narratives from the perspectives of patient and lived experience. The project was co-curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz and George Vasey. The Wellcome Collection challenges how people think and feel about health and this essay explores how the exhibition built upon those ambitions. The text addresses how the content of the exhibition was supported by the various exhibition elements: narrative, process, architecture and design, interpretation and live programming. ‘How we die is how we live, only more so’ (Ashery, 2016)

This paper explores the representation of the history of women in engineering as it appears on the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. Using biography pages on women engineers for a high-level quantitative overview, and the ‘History of women in engineering’ page as a specific example for qualitative examination, this research highlights inequalities in how women engineers are represented compared with men engineers. There are significantly fewer Wikipedia biography articles on women engineers compared with men engineers, and those articles are far less central and findable, with fewer incoming links. The article page on the ‘History of women in engineering’ is of poor quality and is flagged as such to readers. Here, the under-representation of women engineers on Wikipedia is set in the specific context of Wikipedia. The context of societal differences beyond the internet is also explored. The paper concludes by discussing practical attempts to redress the imbalance, and challenges to consider in planning future efforts.

When George Adams assembled a large collection of philosophical instruments for King George III in the early 1760s, he drew on a variety of printed books as sources of experiments and instrument designs. Most important of these was Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy by the Dutch mathematician and philosopher Willem ’s Gravesande, whose own collection of instruments is now in the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. Papers in the Science Museum archives reveal the specific practices through which Adams used books such as Mathematical Elements in the course of his business. These techniques included commonplacing, a widespread method for organising information in the early-modern period; and physically cutting and pasting fragments from engraved illustrations into new drawings, as part of the process of design. These practices connected mobile print with local networks of production. They fundamentally shaped the group of instruments Adams made for George III, and constitute a material link between two important collections of 18th-century instruments: those of ’s Gravesande in Leiden, and those of George III at the Science Museum in London.