"Information Age" at the Science Museum
On 8 November 2014, I went to the Science Museum in London to visit Information Age, their new permanent exhibition about communication and information technologies. I'd been looking forward to it for a while, as I managed to see posters advertising it on almost every visit to the museum over the last year or two. It brings together artefacts from several smaller galleries that I felt had been neglected in recent years, as well as many artefacts not seen in the museum before (some of which would've been too big to exhibit elsewhere).
The gallery seen from the mezzanine, looking towards the front entrance
The exhibition is divided into six broad areas - The Cable (telegraph and undersea cables), The Telephone Exchange, Broadcast (TV and radio), The Constellation (communication satellites), The Cell (mobile phones) and The Web (computing and the Internet). I spent most of my time in The Cable, as I didn't know much about that, and The Web, mainly for the sake of nostalgia. I was there for a couple of hours, and could easily have spent the entire day there.
The Cable provides a good overview and lots of interesting detail about this industry, revolutionary at the time, but almost forgotten nowadays. An oddity of the layout means that you'll probably see the exhibits about early undersea cables before early land-based telegraphs, even though the latter were invented first.
There was an embarrassing mistake in the construction of the first transatlantic cable in 1858. It was made in two halves, because no single ship was big enough to carry the whole thing. (Brunel's Great Eastern, which laid several cables, hadn't been built yet.) Two ships set out from Ireland, each carrying half the cable. The plan was that they'd sail to the middle of the Atlantic, join their halves, then sail in opposite directions. Unfortunately, the two halves had been manufactured by two different companies, and the outer layer of the cable's insulation, consisting of iron wires that coiled around the inner part, turned in opposite directions. Without some clever splicing, the two lots of insulation would tend to unwind one another. As it happened, the cable failed after about three weeks anyway - the physics of long transmission lines weren't well-understood at the time, and one of the company's senior engineers insisted on driving it at high voltage, which caused the insulation to break down.
The Web has several landmark computers (the Pilot ACE, part of an IBM System/360, part of a CDC 6600, an Altair 8800, a ZX81, the NeXT workstation that ran the first website at CERN, and one of Google's first server racks), as well as some rather more obscure machines. Chief among these is part of a BESM, a Soviet supercomputer intended as a rival to the CDC 6600. I was amused to learn that "BESM" is an abbreviation for the Russian for "large electronically computing machine".
I would happily have spent another couple of hours here, but wanted to see what was new in the rest of the museum, so will probably go back at some point.
The gallery seen from the mezzanine, looking towards the front entrance
The exhibition is divided into six broad areas - The Cable (telegraph and undersea cables), The Telephone Exchange, Broadcast (TV and radio), The Constellation (communication satellites), The Cell (mobile phones) and The Web (computing and the Internet). I spent most of my time in The Cable, as I didn't know much about that, and The Web, mainly for the sake of nostalgia. I was there for a couple of hours, and could easily have spent the entire day there.
The Cable provides a good overview and lots of interesting detail about this industry, revolutionary at the time, but almost forgotten nowadays. An oddity of the layout means that you'll probably see the exhibits about early undersea cables before early land-based telegraphs, even though the latter were invented first.
There was an embarrassing mistake in the construction of the first transatlantic cable in 1858. It was made in two halves, because no single ship was big enough to carry the whole thing. (Brunel's Great Eastern, which laid several cables, hadn't been built yet.) Two ships set out from Ireland, each carrying half the cable. The plan was that they'd sail to the middle of the Atlantic, join their halves, then sail in opposite directions. Unfortunately, the two halves had been manufactured by two different companies, and the outer layer of the cable's insulation, consisting of iron wires that coiled around the inner part, turned in opposite directions. Without some clever splicing, the two lots of insulation would tend to unwind one another. As it happened, the cable failed after about three weeks anyway - the physics of long transmission lines weren't well-understood at the time, and one of the company's senior engineers insisted on driving it at high voltage, which caused the insulation to break down.
The Web has several landmark computers (the Pilot ACE, part of an IBM System/360, part of a CDC 6600, an Altair 8800, a ZX81, the NeXT workstation that ran the first website at CERN, and one of Google's first server racks), as well as some rather more obscure machines. Chief among these is part of a BESM, a Soviet supercomputer intended as a rival to the CDC 6600. I was amused to learn that "BESM" is an abbreviation for the Russian for "large electronically computing machine".
I would happily have spent another couple of hours here, but wanted to see what was new in the rest of the museum, so will probably go back at some point.
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J.M.
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Nov 14, 2014 05:11PM
I'm glad that the clever splicing worked out. Otherwise that would have been even more embarrassing. Sounds like a fascinating exhibit. I would have loved to spend time in the Constellation. Do you visit this museum often?
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I probably visit the Science Museum two or three times a year. It's about an hour away by train and Tube, so it's fairly easy to get to. I'd say it's my favourite museum - not that I can name many museums I don't like :-)
