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Abstract
The Science Museum has in its East Hall one of the finest collections of steam engines anywhere. The collection has traditionally been interpreted in formal taxonomical terms. However, as the display scheme has become physically fragmented, and the museum’s relationship with its visitors has been assessed in new ways, so new approaches to interpreting the collection have been sought. The primary and secondary source review underpinning development of a revised gallery scheme for the East Hall suggested the existence of an ‘imaginarium of steam’, a body of historic material illustrating how the steam engine exerted an imaginative hold on those who built, worked with, and observed it. The steam engine was as much a symbolic and imaginative machine as it was a tangible one. This is reflected in a rich range of sources, stretching far beyond the technical sources so traditionally and closely identified with the engine. This paper will outline some of these primary sources with particular reference to the museum’s collection and other appropriate material culture, and attempt to identify some of their shared characteristics, which together form the imaginarium.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 H. W. Dickinson, ‘Museums and their relation to the History pf Engineering and Technology’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 14.1 (1933), 1–12, p. 9.
2 The two engines are Science Museum objects, inv. nos. 1861-45 and 1861-46 respectively. For more on the early history of the collections, see J. Hewish, Rooms Near Chancery Lane: The Patent Office under the Commissioners, 1852-1883 (London: The British Library), 2000, especially ch.13.
3 A readily-accessible example of the cataloguing in the form of the 1919 Catalogue of the Mechanical Engineering Collections can be found at https://archive.org/details/catalogueofmecha00victrich [accessed 21 December 2021]. Science Museum object, inv. no. 1924-486, ‘Diagram “Synopsis of Events connected with Prime Movers” framed and glazed. From rough draft prepared by Museum Officers.’ Similar diagrams were prepared for pumps and railway transport, too.
4 Science Museum Archives, Ordinary File (Nominal) 100/133, ‘Museum Collections - Motive Power: New Presentation in East Hall’, memo dated 13 November 1974 by Mr Winton.
5 L. H. Silverman, ‘Visitor Meaning-Making in Museums for a New Age’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 38.3 (1995), 161–70.
6 An accessible summary of the ‘Science Capital’ approach can be found at https://learning.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/academy/academy-training/science-capital-in-practice/ [accessed 21 December 2023].
7 Science Museum, internal evaluation report, ‘Ascending’ the Objects: How Should We Bring Watt’s Workshop to Audiences?, The Susie Fisher Group, February 2009, p. 10.
8 R. C. Post, ‘No Mere Technicalities: How Things Work and Why It Matters’, Technology and Culture, 40.3 (July 1999), pp. 607–22, p. 611.
9 Flora Tristan’s London Journal 1840, trans. by D. Palmer and G. Pincetl (Charlestown: Charles River Books, 1980), p. 65.
10 For more on that, see Ben Russell, James Watt: Making the world anew (London: Reaktion, 2014).
11 J. R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 564–5.
12 Jennings, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (New York: The Free Press, 1985).
13 A. Briggs, The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World’s Steam Age (London: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 73–86.
14 Michael Punt, ‘The Technological Imaginary and the Cognitive Trace’, https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/6576 [accessed 24 August 2023], p. 8.
15 T. Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
16 Stella Pratt-Smith, ‘Review of Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines…’, Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 10.1 (2012), p.1.
17 J. Dalton, A Descriptive Poem Addressed to Two Ladies, at Their Return from Viewing the Mines Near Whitehaven (London: Printed for J. and J. Rivington, and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), p. 12.
18 W. O. Henderson, Industrial Britain Under the Regency: The Diaries of Escher, Bodmer, May and de Gallois 1814-18 (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 46. This landscape has been vividly captured in Thomas Hair’s watercolour images of the Northumberland and Durham coalfields, now preserved in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.
19 William Howitt, Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Hall, Battlefields, And Scenes Illustrative of Striking Passages in History and Poetry: Chiefly in the Counties of Durham and Northumberland (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), pp. 288–90.
20 Joshua White, Letters on England: Comprising Descriptive Scenes with Remarks on the State of Society, Domestic Economy, Habits of the People, and Condition of the Manufacturing Classes Generally, Vol 1. (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1820), p. 338.
21 C. G. Carus, The King of Saxony’s Journey Through England and Scotland in the Year 1844 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), p. 263.
22 Sir George Head, A Home Tour Throught the Manufacturing Districts of England, in the summer of 1835 (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1836), p. 154.
23 Louis Simond, An American in Regency England: The Journal of a Tour in 1810-1811, ed. by Christopher Hibbert (London: The History Book Club, 1968), pp. 132–3.
24 Science Museum technical file T/1861-45, Edward Price to Francis Pettit Smith, Patent Office Museum, 18 February 1862. ‘Old Bess’ remains on display.
25 C. Dickens “The Individuality of Locomotives”, Household Words, 1.26 (1850).
26 Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland AD 1803, ed. by C. J. Sharp, p. 17. Digitised at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28880/28880-h/28880-h.htm [accessed 24 August 2023].
27 J. Coad, The Portsmouth Block Mills (London: Historic England, 2003), p. 102.
28 I used the Everyman’s Library edition of Shirley (London: JM Dent, 1935), p. 418.
29 Fanny Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1880), p. 281. This description makes an interesting comparison with the sketch of a Great Western Railway locomotive made by the American architect and engineer William Strickland on February 6th 1838 which, though of indeterminate sex is (bad-temperedly) characterful. See https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/Strickland/id/57/rec/3 [accessed 24 August 2023].
30 As recounted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson (Jones & Co., London, 1827), p. 282.
31 R. L. Hills, James Watt Volume 3: Triumph Through Adversity, 1785-1819 (Ashbourne: Landmark, 2006), p. 19.
32 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, A Poem, In Two Parts; Containing The Economy of Vegetation and the Loves of the Plants (London: Jones & Co., 1825), p. 17.
33 W. M. Tait, The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1840), p. 91. Available online at https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ubtcAAAAcAAJ&pg=GBS.PA90&hl=en_GB [accessed 24 August 2023].
34 J. Farey, Treatise on the Stationary Steam Engine, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green), 1827, p. 3.
35 S. Smiles, James Nasmyth (London: John Murray, 1885), p. 108.
36 Jean-Baptiste Say, England and the English People (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1816), p. 38.
37 Say, England and the English People, pp. 38–9.
38 Henderson, Industrial Britain Under the Regency, p. 159.
39 J.-B. Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, Book 1 (Philadelphia: J. Grigg, 1855), p. 16.
40 R. Porter, A Social History of England in the 18th Century (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 334.
41 This marathon process is illustrated at M. Jackson and C. de Beer, Eighteenth Century Gunfounding (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), p. 131.
42 H. Schaefer, Nineteenth Century Modern (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 25.
43 T. Tredgold, The Steam Engine (London: Taylor, 1827), p. 44.
44 J. Bourne, Treatise on the Steam Engine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868), pp. 176–7.
45 Farey Treatise on the Stationary Steam Engine, Vol. 1, p. 473.
46 Schaefer, Nineteenth Century Modern, p. 25.
47 Tredgold, The Steam Engine, p. 212.
48 G. Bathe, An Engineer’s Miscellany (Philadelphia: Press of Patterson & White company, 1938), p. 25.
49 J. Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 179.
50 W. O. Henderson, J.C. Fischer and his Diary of Industrial England 1814-51 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 131.
51 L. Ince, ‘Maudslay, Sons & Field, 1831-1904’, in Henry Maudslay & the Pioneers of the Machine Age, ed. by G. Cookson and J. Cantrell (Stroud: Landmark, 2002), pp. 166–84, p. 166. For an example of Maudslay’s Gothic engines from 1832, see T. Tredgold, The Principles, Practice and Explanation of the Machinery Used in Steam Navigation (London: Weale, 1851), Plate 6.
52 Tredgold, The Steam Engine, p. 354, explanation of Plate XV. The ‘table’ engine was so called because it did away with the rocking beam, and sat the piston on a table of cast iron, from which it turned the crank and flywheel beneath.
53 S. Clegg, Architecture of Machinery: An Essay on Propriety of Form and Proportion (London: Architectural Library, 1842), pp. 3–4.
54 For more information (but sadly not an image), see https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-an-exceptional-early-19th-century-gilded-brass-751275/?from=salesummery&intobjectid=751275 [accessed 24 August 2023].
55 https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/23024/lot/47/ [accessed 24 August 2023].
56 Catalogue, Christie’s Transport Memorabilia and Models, Thursday 23 February 1995 and Friday 24 February 1995, back cover.
57 Briggs, The Power of Steam, p. 91.
58 Henderson, Industrial Britain Under the Regency, p. 159.
59 An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775-1779, ed. by K. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 253.
60 The Torrington Diaries: Containing the Tours Through England Wales of the Hon. John Byng Between the Years 1781 and 1794, ed. by B. Andrews (London: Eyre & Spttiswoode, 1935), p. 196.
61 Francis Klingender’s classic Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) and Celina Fox’s the Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment (2009) must surely be the keystones in this area.
62 Henderson, J.C. Fischer and his Diary of Industrial England, p. 134.
63 Science Museum, Patent Office Museum unregistered file, ‘Early Engines’, W. Jenkins, Dowlais, to H. Price, Neath Abbey, 23 November 1867.
64 Science Museum, Patent Office Museum unregistered file, ‘Early Engines’, H.A. Fletcher to J Thompson Scott, 2 January and 15 January 1869.
65 ‘Notes from Address Given to Royal Scottish Society of Arts by Prof George Wilson, November 23rd 1857’, Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts 5 (1861), pp. 43–62, p. 52. The desire to provide ‘houses of refuge’ could be taken to extremes, as it was by Bennet Woodcroft in his unauthorised exhumation of the Marquis of Worcester in January 1861, in pursuit of a model ‘Water Commanding Engine’ supposedly buried with him when he died. See Science Museum technical file T/1897-114, report by John MacGregor, January 5, 1861.
66 H. Jennings, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (New York: The Free Press, 1985), p. 39.
67 https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co66621/shaving-by-steam-print [accessed 24 August 2023].
68 https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co66381/locomotion-print [accessed 24 August 2023]. The best survey of this satirical goldmine I have found is the catalogue of an exhibition, A Sense of Humour: Cartoons, Satirical Sketches and Caricatures from the Elton Collection, mounted by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, 8 December 1979 to 2 March 1980.
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Ben Russell
Ben Russell has been Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum in London since 2003. Ben has been Lead Curator for six major galleries and exhibitions at the museum, from Cosmonauts to Robots, and just opened a new gallery ‘Engineers’, in partnership with the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He wrote James Watt: Making the world anew (2014), and edited Robots (2017).