TY - JOUR TI - �Something simple and striking AU - Jean-Baptiste Gouyon PY - 2014 VL - 1 IS - Spring 2014 KW - Freedom 7 KW - Henry Calvert KW - history of museum practices KW - Science Museum KW - space exploration KW - visual sources AB - From October 1965 to May 1966, the Science Museum in London displayed the American spacecraft Freedom 7, the first capsule in NASA’s Mercury programme to take a human on a suborbital flight. Archival records concerning this temporary display are extensive and contain photographic sources as well as written ones. This case therefore lends itself to a study aimed at evaluating the comparative merits of these two types of records, for understanding the logic at play in the display, and for retrieving at least part of the visitors’ experience. Visual sources emerge from this comparison as invaluable records for accessing the materiality of this temporary exhibition. They demonstrate that the Freedom 7 special exhibition was a key moment in the establishment of a space science and technology section at the Science Museum, as it enabled the Museum to begin historicising what was then a new field of scientific and technological enquiry. The exhibition follows a logic of display theorised in 1950 by Henry Calvert, a senior curator, in a note recently discovered in the Science Museum’s archives. It is based on the display of a star object that draws visitors’ attention towards less charismatic exhibits. N1 - For a start see the essays in the collection edited by Peter Vergo, The New Museology (1989). See also the paper by Sophie Forgan (2003) on displays of atomic energy in the post-war period, or Alison Griffith’s monograph on the use of visual technologies in museum settings (2008). Several essays in the collection edited by Peter Morris, Science for the Nation (2010a), are also relevant here, in particular Andrew Nahum’s (2010). N1 - Report of the Science Museum for the year 1964, p.4. N1 - Science Museum, Report of the Advisory Council for the year 1955, p 1.  N1 - Who accomplished, onboard the capsule, the first manned sub-orbital flight of the Mercury programme, on 5 May 1961. N1 - ‘Freedom 7 special exhibition. Summary of events’, Science Museum file SCM 2581. N1 - Ibid. N1 - See the relevant correspondence in SCM 2581. N1 - This reel of film (probably an 8 mm) remains to be found either in London or in Edinburgh.  N1 - The object numbers are respectively 1965-159 and 1965-160. N1 - The object numbers are respectively 1964-203, 1964-327 and 1964-328. N1 - See Science Museum file SCM 1534, ‘Shawcraft Ltd’. N1 - See Science Museum file SCM 2361, ‘MacDonnell corporation’. N1 - Science Museum technical file T-1965-160. N1 - ‘Display panel of Freedom 7 exhibition – 2’, Science Museum photographic archives, Neg. No. 650479. N1 - See related internal correspondence in SCM 2581. N1 - It can be noted that a letter by Donovan Chilton from 29 July 1965 is written on a sheet of paper bearing the heading ‘SPACE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SECTION’ (SCM 2581). PB - The Science Museum Group SN - 2054-5770 LA - eng DO - 10.15180/140105 UR - http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/2014/something-simple-and-striking/ T2 - Science Museum Group Journal
http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/citation/ris/article/1711
journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-05
3719
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:W4XZOTWZIFT5UEOF5EEYGQYSRET765SY
<urn:uuid:b327fc96-8f11-42ed-a22e-d202ab5cab9f>
2018-01-16T18:58:47Z
95.129.105.38
text/plain
sha1:CAE47PJA2EM6IQU5K574MBYGPUPGUSSQ
<urn:uuid:88bccbd2-10f2-4261-86e7-b657d8ad8f55>
http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/citation/ris/article/1711
response
<urn:uuid:b22fe863-b3ae-4a5c-b860-e688c9ca8b34>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-169-128-21.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf