Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
cally through quality control, and to our understanding the biochemistry
of life. It also aimed to illustrate how chemistry, especially analysis and
organic chemistry, had developed since 1800. The display was designed
to be a series of contrasts, between pure and applied chemistry, between
the chemical apparatus of the late nineteenth century and modern digital
chemical equipment, and between the scientific and the personal life of
chemists, for instance, Charles Friedel's sword and Marcelin Berthelot's
fez. The target audience was family groups with children over 14, inde-
pendent adults, university and college students, not very different from
the audience for the 1977 redisplay.
The new acquisitions for the gallery were mainly modern examples of
chemical equipment, such as a pencil-sized pH meter, a digital polari-
meter, and a FTIR spectrometer. Some artifacts were very similar to Vic-
torian predecessors in their basic operation, but the modern versions
looked different, for example, the Tintometer or the Pensky-Marten
flashpoint apparatus. Another key acquisition was the donation of an
early NMR magnet by Jack Powles which had the virtue of being small
enough to go into the display case. The key objects in the gallery were a
combination of molecular models - ranging from Dalton's wooden at-
oms and an early glyptic model kit to Hodgkin's model of insulin and the
'forest of rods' - and classic scientific instruments including the Beck-
man Model G pH meter, the Beckman DU ultraviolet spectrometer, and
the Perkin-Elmer Model 21 infrared spectrophotometer. I also made a
point of displaying a number of historic chemicals including alkaloids
isolated by Pelletier and Caventou, fatty acids prepared by Chevreul, and
chemicals synthesized by Wurtz, Friedel, and Grignard. The gallery had
one long wall case and for a while it had a large freestanding case which
housed the large molecular models. Originally it also had three freestand-
ing interactives, which were the first interactives in a pure chemistry gal-
lery at the Science Museum, although there had been interactives in the
earlier Industrial Chemistry Galleries. Subsequently, they were moved to
make way for a temporary exhibition and were not replaced, partly be-
cause they had started to become faulty even after only a year. Informa-
tion panels replaced the traditional captions and the objects had only very
brief identifying labels. It was originally intended to supply additional
information about the artifacts and the displayed chemists on computer
