ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

2026 marks the 150th anniversary of an extraordinary and influential exhibition held in the buildings of London’s South Kensington Museum. The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus united some 20,000 scientific and technological objects borrowed from across Britain and Europe with the aim of showcasing scientific instruments of all kinds. The proposed session will form part of the celebrations to mark the anniversary of this exhibition, which latterly became part of the local mythology of the Science Museum, within which it has been figured as the decisive foundation. As a ‘loan’ collection, it also left several hundred objects that are still parts of the Museum’s collection. The SLCSA’s display grammar, drawing somewhat on the approach of Arts et Metiers in Paris, set the tone for several decades for the displays that developed from the Science Department of the South Kensington Museum into the Science Museum proper after its emergence as a separate organisation in 1909.

Our session will both look at the exhibition and its contents, but also more broadly at the interrelations of science museums that the exhibition stood for, both in the material form of objects in transit between museums internationally, and in terms of the influence of different display styles and languages over the longue durée.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Charlotte Bigg, CNRS

Individual Presentations

• Replicating Brahe’s quadrant: reproductions from the Special Loan Collection for the South Kensington Museum - Mary Clayton-Kastenholz, Warburg Institute

• The Patent Museum, charismatic megafauna and the public history of technology - Richard Dunn, Science Museum, London

• Making the wheels go round: a long view of British engineers and ‘applied mechanics’ in the Special Loan Collection of 1876 - Ben Russell, Science Museum, London

• The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus as a lens on the making of Italy’s scientific heritage around 1876 - Paola Bernadette Di Lieto, University of Padua

Session Organizer

• Timothy Boon, UCL