The museum in the lab: historical practice in the experimental sciences at Cambridge, 1874–1936

Abstract

This paper explores the hoarding, collecting and occasional display of old apparatus in new laboratories. The first section uses a 1936 exhibition of Cambridge’s scientific relics as a jumping-off point to survey the range of historical practices in the various Cambridge laboratories. This panoramic approach is intended to show the variety and complexity of pasts that scientists had used material to conjure in the years prior to the exhibition. Commerce and commemoration emerge as two key themes. The second part turns to the Cavendish Laboratory (experimental physics) to explore the highly specific senses of time and memorialization at play in the early years of the laboratory (c.1874–1910), and the way these were transformed over the subsequent generations leading up to the 1936 moment. The key figure here is James Clerk Maxwell, whose turn to history involved a mix of antiquarianism and modernism. The paper concludes with an attempt to characterize the meanings and significances of ‘the museum in the lab’. This phenomenon ought to be understood in terms of the wide range of ‘collections’ present in laboratory spaces. When men wish to have things remembered, they set up monuments, and write inscriptions and books, – they draw pictures and take photographs, – in order that these material things may help them, in time to come, to call up the thought of that which they were intended to commemorate. James Clerk Maxwell, ‘Psychophysik’ (1878)1 * Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK. Email: [email protected]. This work was supported by the Isaac Newton Trust (grant number RG81914) and the Leverhulme Trust (grant number RG79693). I am especially grateful to Jenny Bangham and Emma Kowal for their productive suggestions and comments on all aspects of museum and laboratory life, and for being such wonderful collaborators on the broader How Collections End project. A version of this paper was presented at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in June 2017, and I would like to thank Anke te Heesen, Mathias Grote and their colleagues for a highly stimulating discussion. Contributors to the How Collections End workshop in Cambridge, October 2017, also gave valuable feedback, notably Alison Boyle, Dahlia Porter and Simon Schaffer. Isobel Falconer has provided invaluable insights into the history of historical practice at the Cavendish. Many thanks to the BJHS editorial team and the anonymous referees for their assistance and insightful comments and corrections. 1 James Clerk Maxwell, ‘Psychophysik’, first printed in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James ClerkMaxwell: With a Selection fromHis Correspondence andOccasionalWritings and a Sketch of His Contributions to Science, London: MacMillan and Co., 1882, pp. 452–463, 454. BJHS: Themes 4: 245–271, 2019. © British Society for the History of Science 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/bjt.2019.6 First published online 7 August 2019 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2019.6 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 81.96.232.76, on 05 Oct 2020 at 09:40:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at When the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory of experimental physics was opened in June 1874, it must have presented a stark vision of the future of science to the gathered dignitaries.2 The building itself was grand enough, especially its neo-Gothic frontage, impressive carved wooden gates and generous south-facing windows.3 But the rooms themselves were surprisingly empty of experimental apparatus. In spite of the long lists of desiderata that the first director, James Clerk Maxwell, had drawn up in preparation, by the time the doors were opened, a laboratory of twenty or so rooms was populated with barely a hundred separate pieces of equipment, many of which were old, or borrowed, or both.4 In response to this situation the chief benefactor of the laboratory, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, offered to pay for new instruments, andMaxwell drew up a list of items to be supplied by the firms of Elliott Brothers, William Ladd, Ludwig Oertling and Sir Joseph Whitworth & Co.5 By April 1875, when Maxwell prepared his first report to the university on the activities of the laboratory, he could list an extensive array of apparatus.6 Amidst this quickly growing collection, however, the following entries stand out: Presented by the late C. Babbage, F.R.S./Thermometer found by Antinori in the repositories of the Accademia del Cimento. Presented by Mrs Faraday/Lines of Magnetic Force prepared by Faraday. Presented by M. Tresca/Model of the Wave-Surface of Fresnel.7 These objects were clearly not intended to further the scientific researches of the Cavendish, but nor were they simply curios to be placed on a desk or hidden in a cupboard. Maxwell’s second report, the following year, showed that the practice of acquiring historic objects was in fact an important part of the life of the laboratory. A list of some ninety instruments was included alongside the following note: A large collection of instruments, apparatus and fittings, has been presented to the University by H.W. Elphinstone, M.A., of Trinity College. Most of these belonged to the celebrated William Hyde Wollaston, M.D., of Gonville and Caius College, and many of them are of historical interest.8 2 A substantial account of the laboratory and the opening ceremony was published in [anon.], Nature (1874) 10, pp. 139–142. 3 On the influences behind the style of the building and the importance of aesthetics see Simon Schaffer, ‘Physics laboratories and the Victorian country house’, in Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (eds.), Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 22–24. 4 For Maxwell’s various lists of equipment, desired and then acquired, see Peter M. Harman (ed.), The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 2: 1862–1873, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 631–632, 868–875; and vol. 3: 1873–1879, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 64–65, 86–88, 209–215, 337–343. 5 Harman, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, pp. 85–88. 6 Harman, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, pp. 208–215. 7 Harman, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, pp. 213–214. 8 Harman, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, pp. 337–343. 246 Boris Jardine https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2019.6 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 81.96.232.76, on 05 Oct 2020 at 09:40:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at If this establishes the scale of antiquarianism in the early years of the Cavendish, we need only turn to Maxwell’s published and unpublished writings for confirmation of the underlying desire and intentionality. The ‘Thermometer found by Antinori in the repositories of the Accademia del Cimento’, for example, was in fact a seventeenth-century instrument that Maxwell had first heard of through his friend Peter Guthrie Tait. After seeing this instrument Maxwell had written with unbridled enthusiasm to Tait: Can you tell me the tale of the Florentine thermometers, one of which is in your Apparatus room having glass beads for degrees? Who made them? at what date? Were any ancient observations made with them which have been translated into modern degrees since the discovery of the instrument. When were they lost? Who discovered them again & when? Who wished they had been discovered? Who gave one to the Edin[burgh] Nat Phil. Is there anything in print about it? Information sent to [me] will receive due attention.9 With remarkable speed Tait’s answers to these queries were incorporated by Maxwell into the chapter on thermometry of his 1871 textbook Theory of Heat. He also tracked down one of the Florentine thermometers that had been presented to Charles Babbage: this was the instrument recorded in the report of 1875, which now took pride of place in the Cavendish’s growing historical collections.10 Within a year of its opening, then, the Cavendish Laboratory was transformed from a sparsely populated lab to a space full of apparatus, much of which was of antiquarian interest rather than experimental utility. In addition to the thermometer, many other important historical objects were stored in the instrument room on the first floor, alongside teaching models and modern experimental apparatus.11 Perhaps surprisingly, this turn to history was common among the new laboratories that rose up in the centre of Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.12 In addition to Maxwell’s idiosyncratic approach to the past – explored at length below – other modes of collecting were more systematic and were tied to the construction of institutional identity. Some laboratories collected or preserved objects in order to celebrate their great achievements or to commemorate important figures; others consolidated certain styles of instrumental work through the tracing of the ‘evolution’ of a piece of commercial apparatus in use or (even better) developed in the laboratory. The contexts for this phenomenon were institutional and spatial. The Cavendish Laboratory was situated on a site first developed for scientific museums, and it developed both within and against the framework of the ‘museological’ sciences.13 Cambridge’s 9 Harman, op. cit. (4), vol. 2, p. 645; for Maxwell’s further researches see p. 648. 10 James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871, p. 34. 11 For plans of the newly opened Cavendish see [anon.], op. cit. (2), pp. 140–141. 12 On the ‘rise’ of these laboratori