Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
academic chemistry exhibits. Therefore, the image of industrial chemis-
try will be the subject of a subsequent paper.
2.
History of Chemistry at the Science Museum
The Science Museum has its origins in the South Kensington Museum
which was founded in 1857 following the great popularity of the Great
Exhibition of 1851 which garnered a considerable financial surplus
(Hobhouse 2002). The mission of the South Kensington Museum was the
promotion of art and science, art in this context being what we would
now call crafts and design, and it came under the control of the Depart-
ment of Science and Art (Follett 1978). The relatively few chemistry
exhibits were in the wall cases of the Education Museum, which was part
of the South Kensington Museum. The science and engineering col-
lections were expanded after the Royal Commission on Scientific
Instruction and the Advancement of Science ('Devonshire') Commission
reported on the South Kensington collections in its fourth report of 1874.
As a consequence, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851
offered to build a science museum if the government provided the site,
but this offer was not taken up. For their part, the Lords of Committee of
the [Privy] Council on Education, led by Viscount Sandon, set up a
committee chaired by the Lord Chancellor (Baron Cairns) to organize a
temporary international exhibition of scientific instruments (Special
Loan Catalogue 1876). This Special Loan Exhibition held in 1876 was
supported
inter alia
, by Frederick Abel, Edward Frankland, Jean Baptiste
Dumas, and Wilhelm Hofmann. It was displayed in the Western Gal-
leries of the Royal Horticultural Society's exhibition halls, which had
originally been erected for the International Exhibition of 1862. The
Special Loan Exhibition was an important watershed in the development
of the Science Museum as many of the objects on loan for this exhibition
were left at the museum, although only a few in the case of chemistry,
including demonstration apparatus developed by Hofmann.
After the control of the Patent Museum moved from the Commis-
sioners of Patents to the Department of Science and Art in 1883, that mu-
seum was amalgamated with the Science Museum. This collection had
hitherto been completely distinct in institutional terms, but displayed
