Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
the famous reconstruction of Lavoisier's laboratory and its associated
artifacts, but little else connected with chemistry.
According to Elisabeth Vaupel, the format of the pure chemistry
galleries on the first floor of the Deutsches Museum was developed for
the opening of the museum in 1906 by three leading chemists, Hans
Bunte, Walther Nernst, and, above all, Wilhelm Ostwald, who had a
strong interest in the history (and philosophy) of chemistry (Vaupel
2003). As well as drawing on their own experience as teachers of
chemistry, the three professors drew on the World Fairs for inspiration.
Certainly their schema was very different from the Science Museum's
Western Galleries. The chemistry galleries were divided into three
roughly equal parts: the history and development of chemistry, the
contemporary science, and finally what we would now call an interactive
section where visitors could carry out their own experiments. While the
Science Museum did adopt a mixture of history and contemporary
chemistry in the 1920s, there was certainly no interactive elements at all
until 1999, and even then only briefly. Underpinning this approach, with
its expensive use of chemicals and other materials in the interactives, was
massive financial support from the German chemical industry, which
was at its peak in the early years of the twentieth century. The scale and
the continuity of this support are in stark contrast to the Science Museum
where only one set of pure chemistry galleries (1964) has received any
significant financial support from industry. With the obvious exception
of the content of the contemporary chemistry section, the basic plan
drawn up by Bunte, Nernst, and Ostwald has remained largely
unchanged up to the present day (Deutsches Museum Guides 1930, 1957,
1968, 1988, and 2000). Industrial chemistry was originally an integral
part of the chemistry gallery, as it was at the Science Museum between
1912 and 1939, but a chemical technology gallery was opened on the
second floor in 1965, which displayed the chemistry of everyday life as
well as process engineering and industrial processes (Rehn 2006). This
gallery was replaced in 1979 by a gallery on the first floor which dealt
with industrial chemistry with an emphasis on chemical products, rather
than processes, and the use of chemistry in medicine (Deutsches
Museum Guide 1988, pp. 173-179). This in turn was closed in 1998 and
replaced by a gallery on pharmacy in 2000.
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