Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
alongside the South Kensington Museum in the so-called 'Brompton
boilers' (from the appearance of the buildings and their location on the
Brompton Road). The non-art collections of the South Kensington Mu-
seum had been known as the Science Collections, presumably to reflect
the dichotomy in the title of the Department of Science and Art, and fol-
lowing the amalgamation with the Patent Museum, the Department
changed the name of the collections to the Science Museum. As Sir Phil-
lip Cunliffe-Owen was still in post as Director of the South Kensington
Museum, a separate director for the Science Museum was not appointed
until he retired in 1893. The first director was Major-General Edward R.
Festing FRS, who had joined the South Kensington Museum in 1864,
and had explored the potential of infrared spectroscopy as an analytical
tool with Sir William Abney in the 1880s.
The Science Museum's collections were transferred in 1888 from the
South Kensington Museum to the Western and Southern Galleries occu-
pied up to that date by the Royal Horticultural Society. Science was in
the Western Galleries, which were to the west of the current Imperial
College Library building. They were smaller in area than the Southern
Galleries and away from the main entrance on Exhibition Road. The
Western Galleries did not attract many visitors, only 86,216 in 1908
compared with 384,889 for the technological collections in the Southern
Galleries (Board of Education 1909). In fact the name 'Science Museum'
has always been a complete misnomer. Technology not science has al-
ways been the dominant aspect of the Science Museum and until the di-
rectorship of the chemist and historian of chemistry Frank Sherwood
Taylor in the early 1950s, chemistry was a relatively minor part of the
Science Museum's displays. The modest chemistry galleries were on the
first (top) floor of the Western Galleries at the north end just to the south
of Prince Consort Road, near the present-day Blackett Laboratory of Im-
perial College.
The South Kensington Museum was renamed the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1899, when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the
new building for the art collections. By what seems to have been a bu-
reaucratic oversight, the Science Museum was considered a division of
the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1909, the famous chemist and politi-
cian Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe led a delegation of scientists and engi-
