ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Patent Museum, charismatic megafauna and the public history of technology

• In Event: Spirit of 1876: The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus: International Science Museum Links. 1

English Abstract

This paper deploys the concept of charismatic megafauna, a term usually applied to particular animal species used to gain public support for environmentalist goals, as a way of thinking about the display and interpretation of large, striking historic artefacts in exhibition contexts and, in turn, in popular accounts of technological progress. It focuses on items lent to the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus by the Patent Museum (which sat within the site of the South Kensington Museum but was separate from it) and by its founder, Bennet Woodcroft. Included among those items, for examples, was Stephenson’s Rocket, already a potent symbol of individual ingenuity and industrial revolution. Subsequently passed to the South Kensington Museum and thus to the Science Museum, this and other charismatic objects exhibited in the 1876 exhibition have retained their status as icons of British inventive genius and as milestones in particular historiographies of science and technology.

Author

• Richard Dunn, Science Museum, London