Abstract Summary
The staff of the Science Museum in the Second World War years were faced with a dilemma. With its first purpose-built building opened in 1928, only two decades later they already felt their displays to be very old-fashioned. The galleries devoted to evolutionary sequences of technologies divided by textbook divisions – such as optics, acoustics, mechanical engineering and the rest – felt to many of them to be tired, lacking the modernity and sophistication of Paris’s Palais de la Decouverte, opened in 1937. When the independently produced science exhibition of the Festival of Britain, itself an exemplification of the Parisian style, opened on a site behind the Museum in 1951, the contrast was sorely felt. At stake was whether to exhibit scientific principles in the modern style, or whether to display assemblages of historical objects. In other words, the temporary 1951 exhibition made evident an immanent distinction between exhibiting science and exhibiting its history. Into this ferment stepped 1950’s new director, Frank Sherwood Taylor, the only historian-director the institution has known. In this paper I explore some of Sherwood Taylor’s responses to the Museum’s postwar dilemma over history and propose an interpretation of how he squared the circle of contemporary versus historical approaches to science.
