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The Science Museum
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Free Seminars (6)
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Black Arrow: British Rocket Science and the Cold War
From:
Science Museum
The Black Arrow represents Britain's only attempt to launch a spacecraft using a British rocket. The Black Arrow programme comprised a series of five rockets between 1966 and 1971. This seminar draws on the Science Museum's unique collection of rocket engines and vehicles to tell Black Arrow's story. It relates the technological history to the political climate at the time, both in Britain and abroad. In doing so it outlines how and why Black Arrow was created and later allowed to die. This seminar will be of interest to those who wish to know more of the forces that drive space exploration and to those who are interested in Britain's political, military and technological aspirations during the Cold War.
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Electricity on Show: Spectacular Events in Victorian London
From:
Science Museum
The science of electricity underwent a massive transformation during the Victorian era. As new ways of producing electricity proliferated, there were more and more places where electricity and its products could be encountered. In this seminar, Iwan Rhys Morus explains how exhibitions provided a way of bringing electricity, electricians and their productions inside public culture.
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Powered by Steam: The Steam Engine 1780-1830
From:
Science Museum
British industry expanded rapidly in the years after 1780. At the vanguard were the cotton masters, whose methods set a precedent for factory production. In this seminar, Ben Russell of the Science Museum looks at the factors affecting the use of the rotative steam engine in the cotton industry, and considers some of the alternatives that were available. Russell demonstrates how technological improvements, as well as business considerations, shaped the use of steam power through the nineteenth century.
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Spectacle of Dress in Victorian Painting
From:
Science Museum
The mid-nineteenth century in Britain was a time of invention and experimentation with new technologies and textile processes, allowing the manufacture of a range and diversity of clothing not previously seen. This seminar reveals the various ways in which dress was important to Victorians and those who portrayed them through a comparative analysis of three Victorian paintings.
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The Spectacular Female Body: Dress, Fashion and Modernity in Victorian Women's Magazines
From:
Science Museum
The periodical magazine was one of the fastest growing commodities in Victorian Britain, with about 12,500 titles appearing between 1824 and 1900. An interest in and celebration of fashion was something that all commercial magazines shared, and even the non-commercial titles, such as those devoted to reform issues, covered fashion (constructed as so important to women's lives), if only to critique its pervasive and pernicious influence. In this seminar, Kay Boardman, lecturer English in the department of cultural studies at the University of Central Lancashire, explores this complex relationship by looking at four particular items which are all related to the fashion system in one way or another: the fashion plate, the corset, the bloomer and the bicycle.
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Victorian Values: Death and Dying in Victorian India
From:
Science Museum
In this seminar, David Arnold, professor of south Asian history at the School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London, explores Victorian attitudes to death and dying in India. He argues that an increasing European sense of security from disease and sudden death was matched by an increasing tendency to label Indians as the author of their own misery, and to view the scale of death in this era as signs of a feebler race, an inferior civilisation.
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