How to put a black box in a showcase: History of science museums and recent heritage

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 660–668

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

How to put a black box in a showcase: History of science museums and recent heritage Ad Maas Museum Boerhaave, PO Box 11280, 2301 EG Leiden, The Netherlands

a r t i c l e

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Keywords: Recent scientific heritage History of science museums Museum Boerhaave Museology Kamerlingh Onnes Unilever Research

a b s t r a c t Coping with recent heritage is troublesome for history of science museums, since modern scientific artefacts often suffer from a lack of esthetic and artistic qualities and expressiveness. The traditional objectoriented approach, in which museums collect and present objects as individual showpieces is inadequate to bring recent heritage to life. This paper argues that recent artefacts should be regarded as ‘‘key pieces.’’ In this approach the object derives its meaning not from its intrinsic qualities but from its place in an important historical event or development. The ‘‘key pieces’’ approach involves a more organic way of collecting and displaying, focussing less on the individual object and more on the context in which it functioned and its place in the storyline. Finally, I argue that the ‘‘key pieces’’ approach should not be limited to recent heritage. Using this method as a general guiding principle could be a way for history of science museums to appeal to today’s audiences. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Among the museum curators who practise the noble art of preserving scientific heritage for posterity, the ones taking care of modern artefacts are the scrap dealers. Their colleagues visit auctions, raise glasses with well-to-do collectors and bring shiny, well-conserved, and artfully made showpieces to the museum. Meanwhile, curators of the modern period risk their health in badly ventilated sheds, storerooms, attics and basements, trying to find something useful in obscure bunches of junk that may qualify as future scientific heritage (cf. Fig. 6). I am such a curator. Sometimes I am invited by a dutiful technician or a scientist on the verge of retirement to examine the remnants of old setups. When such a person shows me the material on offer and enthusiastically starts to explain how some of the instruments work, I try as a professional to avoid the impression that I do not understand much about these indeterminate boxes with plugs. All too often, the few really attractive instruments in collections of modern heritage have already been confiscated by directors, who put them on their desks as mementos, or else they have disappeared in some other way. Expensive parts may have been removed to be used in new setups.

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The question I will address is how to assess the inherent value of the unruly remains of modern scientific research, and how they can be presented in a way that makes sense to museum visitors. The question implies another, more fundamental one: what should be the approach to objects, and recent heritage in particular, in history of science museums like Museum Boerhaave. In its present form, Museum Boerhaave, the national museum for the history of science and medicine of the Netherlands, is a typical classical history of science museum (see Section 1). This paper will start with a brief outline of the origins of Museum Boerhaave and its place in the European configuration of history of science museums (Section 1). How did these museums handle their objects in the past? In Section 2, I will define two ideal approaches to museum objects. I will distinguish ‘‘showpieces,’’ in which the intrinsic qualities of the object are emphasized, from ‘‘key pieces,’’ objects whose value depends on a story in which they play a part. As I will set out in Section 3, the showpieces approach traditionally prevailed in Museum Boerhaave. I will argue, next, that this approach has serious shortcomings and that the only useful way to treat modern heritage objects is to present them in the context of major scientific developments or events. History of

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science museums, in other words, would do well to apply the ‘‘key pieces’’ approach to modern heritage (Section 4). To illustrate this, I will end this hybrid paper—based as it is on a study of specialist literature on museums and the history of museums on the one hand, and on my personal experiences as a professional curator on the other hand—with two case studies. Firstly, I will elaborate on an exhibition organized in Museum Boerhaave, Quest for Absolute Zero (2008), which was organized following the ‘key pieces’ approach (Section 5). Next I will discuss the recent acquisition of the collection of scientific instruments formerly belonging to the Dutch Unilever research laboratory, which was guided too by the principles of the ‘‘key pieces’’ approach (Section 6).

1. History of science museums and their modern heritage Museum Boerhaave, or Nederlandsch Historisch Natuurwetenschappelijk Museum (Dutch Historical Museum for the History of Science) as it was named in the early days, was founded in 1927 by a group of professors and physicians with a fondness for scientific and medical instruments and a desire to preserve Dutch scientific heritage. Its first director was August Crommelin (1878– 1965), deputy director of the famous Leiden Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. In Crommelin’s days, the Dutch scientific world was a small community in which everybody knew everybody else, and the founders of the museum themselves also belonged to this small set of scientists. First and foremost, the museum was the preserve of a learned elite of natural scientists and physicians: the happy few capable of appreciating the significance of the historical scientific and medical instruments on show. The scientific objects were not in the first place considered as a means to explain science to wider audiences and to propagate its benefits for society. They were rather taken as ends in themselves. Crommelin’s museum was a modest-sized institute. It attracted only few visitors, but it enjoyed a definite prestige because the scientists and physicians who supported the museum belonged to the leading classes of Dutch society (Bennett, 2006; Huisman, 2011; Maas, 2007; Otterspeer, 2007). Museum Boerhaave started from a different background than the large (and older) European history of science museums such as the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, the Deutsches Museum and the Science Museum. From the start these museums focussed on education and popularization and strove for wide audience appeal. This approach was clearly reflected in the way they presented their objects. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was founded in 1794 with the aim to acquaint the broad public with the ‘encouragement à l’innovation’. Demonstrations of innovative machines and models were intended to disseminate the newest technical developments among especially the artisan classes. Once technical progress had rendered these ‘‘demonstration pieces’’ outdated, the older parts of the collection came to serve ‘‘à presenter l’histoire des arts, et à offrir à l’exam des artistes la marche et progrès des inventions’’ (Jacomy, 1995; Mercier, 1994).1 The innovative machines and models became part of the historical collections, which showed the progress of civilization, and were complemented by ‘real’ historical collections like that of the Académie des Sciences. The collection of the Science Museum went through a similar development. Its roots lie in the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. A number of objects had been acquired from this exhibition, and to preserve them South Kensington Museum was founded in 1

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1857. The public could now see the wonders of technology in the fields of Food, Animal Products, Material for Building and Educational Apparatus. These science collections, which particularly served to educate the ‘artisan class and their teachers’ were then combined with the collection of the Patent Museum. Apart from models of innovations, this collection contained items of historical interest like the fourteenth-century Wells Cathedral Clock. In 1909 the South Kensington Museum was split up in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum. The latter museum was to collect ‘‘as many working models [i.e. demonstration pieces] as possible.’’ The committee that prepared the founding of the Science Museum stated that the institute ‘‘will be of incalculable benefit alike to intellectual progress and to industrial development’’ (Bud, 1997; Morris, 2010; The Science Museum, 1957).2 Modern heritage was not a problem in these museums. On the contrary, it was their core business. The objects and demonstrations of the latest technologies and machines served to instruct visitors about the newest technical developments and to dazzle them with the achievements of the modern world. Before World War II, the special exhibitions in the Science Museum mostly dealt with the latest developments in especially industry and science, with only little emphasis on history. In the Deutsches Museum, there was greater emphasis on the historical parts and their conservation from the start. ‘‘Masterpieces’’ in the history of science and technology, like the optical instruments of Fraunhofer or the first telephonic equipment of Reis, served to ‘‘demonstrate the key stages in the development of modern technology,’’ before they had been ‘‘lost, destroyed or forgotten.’’ Yet its founder, Oskar von Miller (1855–1934) was also inspired by the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and the South Kensington Museum. His main objective was to foster public awareness of the benefits of scientific and technical progress, which, in his view, were largely underrated in Germany. The aim was to target all sections within Germany society, with an emphasis on the young and on the working classes. Education prevailed over conservation: if necessary, housings and casings were removed rücksichtlos or simply cut away to show the inner working of an instrument: the Schnittmodell (the cut-away model) became a standard item of display. Originals were also put to work. Sometimes sportsmen came to the museum after the weekend to have their injuries diagnosed with the X-ray machine (Fehlhammer & Rathjen, 1999; Füßl, 2005; Mayr, 1990). Interestingly, from the beginning the collection of Museum Boerhaave was not confined to historical items either. One of the reasons to found the museum was actually to preserve contemporary artefacts, especially those associated with the cutting-edge cold research that had been conducted in the Kamerlingh Onnes laboratory. The members of Kamerlingh Onnes’ team, including the founding father of the museum, Crommelin, were well aware of the historical strides that had been made in their lab. The ‘‘material witnesses’’ were cherished as a kind of relic, like the first resistances in which superconductivity was observed in lead and tin, the first helium liquefactor, even a battered, broken glass tube in which a record cold had been measured (Fig. 1) (Maas, 2007). Clearly, for these modern artefacts conservation prevailed over instruction. Using instruments as demonstration pieces was never an objective of the museum (though it is on record that during Albert Einstein’s visit, the nineteenth-century Armstrong hydro-electric machine was put into operation at his request). The foundation of Museum Boerhaave coincided with the foundation of similar museums, like the Galileo Museum (formerly the Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, founded in 1927) and the

‘‘To illustrate the history of arts and crafts, and to offer artisans the possibility to examine the progress of innovation.’’ As recently argued by Martin Weiss, the scientific instruments in Teylers Museum (Haarlem, the Netherlands), which occupies a special place in the world of Dutch museums, also went through a similar evolution (Weiss, 2013). 2

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Fig. 1. Part of a tube in which Kamerlingh Onnes achieved his last record cold (0.83 K) in 1922 (MB inventory number V07628).

Museum of the History of Science in Oxford (1935).3 In all of these museums, the conservation of valuable scientific heritage was an end in itself (though in the case of Museum Boerhaave and the Galileo Museum, nationalistic motives—showing the nation’s glorious scientific past—also played a role). A memorandum described the Oxford museum in 1949 as ‘‘a rich source of material alike for the man of science, the historian and the philosopher’’ (cited in: Bennett, 1997, p. 38). These museums were in general primarily directed at and supported by people from the scientific community. In the course of the twentieth century, preserving and presenting historical museum objects thus became a growing focus of attention, both in the newly founded history of science museums as in the older institutions where former state-of-the-art objects as it were naturally evolved into historical pieces. In general, museum ethics do not permit the active use of originals, let alone the cutting away of casings (though some museums, for instance, still allow visitors to look through historical telescopes). The inevitable question is: when modern heritage objects lose their relevance as demonstration pieces, what must we do with them? 2. Showpieces and ‘key pieces’ The question of how to collect and display in a consistent and well-thought manner, should in my view be preceded by another, more fundamental one: how should a museum consider its objects? Leaving demonstration pieces aside, I would like to suggest two approaches to museum artefacts before continuing my story about Museum Boerhaave. The first is the showpieces approach. This object-oriented approach stresses the intrinsic aesthetic, artistic and iconic qualities of the object. Objects can be showpieces because they are beautiful to look at (for instance anatomical wax models), artfully or ingeniously made (glassblowing pieces), emotionally evocative (amputation saws), maybe even cult items, or because they are relics from a glorious past. Showpieces can inspire memories, associations, nationalistic pride, trigger the imagination of the visitors, or appeal to their sense of beauty. Presenting objects as showpieces, in short, suggests that they derive their value from their attractiveness, their ‘‘charisma.’’ Typical auxiliary information carriers such as exhibition labels focus on the individ-

ual object and serve to underline their appeal by stressing their specific features. A larger context is not provided: the objects in this approach, so to speak, have to do it on their own. An alternative approach to objects is to consider them as ‘‘key pieces,’’ as keys to the story behind the artefacts. The ‘‘key pieces’’ approach relies on the interaction of the objects with a ‘‘story,’’ a remarkable historical episode, person or event, which can be readily understood and is capable of captivating and engaging the visitors. In this approach, the objects are part of a more organic mode of display. They derive their value from their place in a storyline.4 Showpieces and key objects are ideal types. In practice an object is always a combination of both: to every object intrinsic qualities can be ascribed. Similarly, every object in a museum setting somehow derives its value from a larger story. Next, it is ultimately the observer who decides how many showpiece or ‘‘key piece’’ qualities can be attributed to an object. Most people appreciate the first helium liquefactor of Kamerlingh Onnes for its role in the history of cryogenics. Some visitors, however, may prefer to view the object as a masterpiece of glassblowing. Showpieces and ‘‘key pieces’’ are—literally—subjective categories. This categorization, then, is not meant to discuss the epistemics of artefacts.5 The reason to distinguish between the two subjective categories is that this can be useful for practical, heuristic reasons: as we will see, it can help the curator to display and collect artefacts consistently and purposefully. Exemplary showpieces approaches are that of art museums who ‘‘excise the object form all contexts except that of a universal aesthetic’’ (Hein, 2000, p. 58) and that of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, Kunstkammer, and cabinets de curieux, where motley collections of objects were exposed to dazzle the viewer with their remarkable appearances. In the nineteenth century, objects were used differently when museums began to follow a more didactic course. Particularly natural history museums, anthropological collections, and—as we have seen—history of science and technology museums were geared towards disseminating the then prevailing epistemics of scientific rationality, regularity, and progress. Displays focused on series of objects of a more commonplace nature rather than the more charismatic, exotic ones. In the Deutsches Museum, for instance, the objects were presented to show that human progress was inherently related to technology and science. Yet, whereas the artefacts were thus highlighted more as key objects, at the same time the museum also aimed explicitly at the charismatic ‘‘masterpiece’’ (Füßl, 2005, pp. 259–263). Indeed, the showpiece approach has survived to this day in many ways (cf. Vergo, 1989, p. 48) and is still the guiding principle in quite a few permanent exhibitions of history of science museums, such as Museum Boerhaave. 3. Relics on an altar It will be clear that in general the showpiece approach implies a more elitist kind of museum, since it presumes a certain level of education and intellectual sensitivity on the part of the visitor (cf. Hein, 2000, p. 17). The showpiece approach depends, in the words of Silverstone (1992, p. 36), on ‘‘the curatorial work of the visitor in which objects are re-inscribed into a personal culture of memory and experience.’’ In the showpiece approach, the visitors, too, are supposed to do it on their own.

3 After World War II, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, the foundation of which is closely connected with its counterpart museum in Oxford, and which also chiefly focussed on conservation, increasingly played an active role in the teaching of the history of science at the University of Cambridge and was eventually incorporated into a teaching department. See: Bennett (1997). 4 Similar, though not identical, distinctions have been made by Allart (2007), from whom I have derived my terminology, by Vergo (1989, pp. 48–52), who speaks of aesthetic versus contextual exhibitions and by Saumarez Smith (1986), who distinguishes between intrinsic and external physical properties. See also: Starn (2005, pp. 22–26). 5 From some philosophical viewpoints the existence of a fundamental, epistemological distinction between showpieces and ‘‘key pieces’’ will be denied, like that from semioticians such as Edwina Taborsky (cf. Taborsky, 1990).

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In the context of Crommelin’s museum, where the visitors were familiar with the ins and outs of the scientific instruments on display, the showpiece approach largely sufficed. The objects were often grouped together type by type—there was a room for air pumps, one for telescopes and microscopes, etc. (Huisman, 2011, pp. 244–245)—with exhibition labels placed in front of them to provide the visitor with some elementary background information (Fig. 2). Although their classification—series of similar objects—was similar to that of the nineteenth-century ‘‘pedagogical’’ museums, the objects themselves were presented in isolation. They were indeed ‘‘relics,’’ as Crommelin himself literally stated (Huisman, 2011, p. 234). Obviously, much has changed in Museum Boerhaave since Crommelin’s days. One of the developments was that scientific artefacts gradually came to be presented within a setting which relied more on cultural historical aspects. The whole museum— which in its current location opened its doors in the early 1990s—is even largely arranged chronologically along the timeline of Dutch cultural history. There is a room for the so-called Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, another one for the Enlightenment era, etc. Yet these themes are not strongly expressed in the rooms; the bias is still very much towards the individual objects. Indeed, the showpiece approach, in which the visitor is left free to interpret

Fig. 2. Telescope room in the early days of Museum Boerhaave.

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the object as he sees fit, was until recently propagated as a fundamentally pure and sound way of showing a collection, and also one that takes the visitors seriously. Museum Boerhaave’s former director used to call the museum ‘‘an altar for the object’’ (see Fig. 3). 4. ‘‘Key piece’’ pragmatism Today, in Museum Boerhaave as in other history of science museums, staff do all they can to attract wider audiences. Introducing the young visitor to science and technology is developing into one of the museum’s major concerns. The aims and objectives of Museum Boerhaave have converged with those of the originally more pedagogically oriented fellow museums, which on their part have tended to become more historical over the course of time. It may also be that the educational background of the visitors has changed. The museum can no longer rely on a fixed stock of knowledge about the scientific past, even among its traditional visitors. The visitor´s attitude, moreover, may also have changed. In an age of neoliberalism and postmodernism, citizens eager to educate themselves, may have transformed into consumers who want to be captivated by an accessible experience and are not averse to guidance (cf. McDonald, 1998). Indeed, the major setback of the showcase approach, one which is increasingly felt—probably not only in Museum Boerhaave—is that often artefacts actually do not posses a lot of charisma. In contrast to works of art, scientific instruments were, after all, not made to please, the way they work is not immediately obvious, and for many visitors their unique qualities need to be explained. They no longer seem to be able to do it on their own. To compensate for the lack of expressive power, contextual material has occasionally been added in exhibitions of history of science museums. In the Deutsches Museum from early on the original objects were characteristically complemented by replicas and dioramas to show how they worked. Photographs, illustrated explanatory tables and even ‘‘push button experiments’’ (Druckknopfexperimente) were also included. Finally, there were ‘‘experience rooms’’ (Erlebnisräume), presenting, for instance, reconstructions of historical laboratories (Füßl, 2005, pp. 303–

Fig. 3. The modern physics room in the permanent exhibition of Museum Boerhaave. Kamerlingh Onnes’ helium liquefactor is in the showcase in the middle.

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316). In modern museums, such additional layers of information have been complemented by computer animations, film, sound samples and sophisticated hands-on games to explain scientific principles. From time to time Museum Boerhaave also introduced animations and photo blow-ups to bring the collection to life. Museologists have observed that the perception of the object has changed in recent decades. Witcomb (2003, p. 6) notes that objects have become less important for their materiality and instead are considered more as an archive of information. Perhaps this shift of the museum ‘‘from treasure house to touch screen’’ is related to the rise of our modern information society in which information and experience replace commodities as the basis of wealth (Witcomb, 2003, p. 114). Hein (2000, pp. 60–68) likewise mentions a shift from the authentic object to the authentic experience, changing museums from chiefly object keepers to ‘‘manufacturers of experience.’’ In line with these developments, history of science collections could be made more expressive and accessible by replacing the ad hoc solutions just mentioned by a more elaborate ‘‘key piece’’ approach, both in terms of acquisition and exhibition policy. This means in the first place that, instead of being considered isolated pieces, the objects are placed in a compelling storyline and will become part of a more organic way of displaying, together with photo blow-ups, hands-on games, and so on (Maas, 2010, p. 62). In collecting strategies, contextual material—photographs, manuals, advertisements, etc.—should also be included as equally valuable artefacts. Unlike showpieces, which derive their value solely from their intrinsic qualities, the objects are now considered also valuable because they represent an important development or event in the history of science. The new ground that has been broken in the history of science discipline in recent decades may facilitate the development of the ‘‘key piece’’ approach in museums. From a rather esoteric discipline, often focusing on the history of ideas, greater emphasis is now being placed on the actors who devised these ideas and the cultural, religious, personal, and social contexts in which they had to operate. Science has become the product of real people in different settings rather than an abstract sequence of superior insights in the working of nature (Bennett, 1995, p. 173). Likewise, museum curators studying scientific instruments have been increasingly shifting their attention to the context in which instruments were used, instead of mainly investigating and describing the way they work (Maas, 2010, p. 66). The current bias towards context and on the human aspects of science has yielded an abundance of new stories and approaches in which scientific artefacts can be placed in a meaningful and often highly accessible manner. Before investigating two examples of deploying the ‘‘key piece’’ approach, I would like to emphasize that when taken to extremes, to treat objects as key objects involves the risk of ignoring their intrinsic qualities—as if these were absolutely irrelevant for the value we attach to them. This position clearly has a disadvantage: a museum simply also likes to collect and display objects that are just wonderful or intriguing to look at. For simple pragmatic reasons, the ideal museum object is not only charismatic but also has an important function as a key object. However, if we look at the chief objects in the Museum Boerhaave collection, we have to conclude that the key factor prevails in practice for the average visitor and curator. Notwithstanding artfully made, conspicuously decorated microscopes and the beautiful papier maché anatomical models of Louis Auzoux, the objects in Museum Boerhaave, the collection of which does not include more charismatic objects from the history of technology (like airplanes or cars), very often derive their value from the stories they embody. And this is preeminently the case for modern heritage—the topic of this paper.

5. Modern heritage on display—the quest for absolute zero For traditional visitors of Museum Boerhaave, the working of an early modern telescope or a nineteenth-century spectroscope is at least quite obvious, and one glance often suffices to estimate and appreciate the masterful manner in which they have been constructed. In contrast, the ingenuity of the bulk-produced black boxes of the modern period lies hidden in electrical circuits and casings. They are neither unique nor attractive, and on top of it they are incomprehensible. Moreover, in the era of Big Science it is often only possible to display just one small part of a large setup, which loses its significance when looked at as an independent object. Indeed, artefacts like these lack all possible qualities that can render them charismatic. In the Quest for Absolute Zero exhibition (10 July 2008—10 May 2009) Museum Boerhaave for the first time deliberately deployed a key object approach, with a compelling storyline and an organic way of displaying, using a lot of contextual material. The story was, indeed, the quest for absolute zero, one of the most adventurous episodes in modern science, with an important role for Dutch physicists. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, scientists from France, Poland, England, and Holland had been engaged in a fierce competition to be the first to liquefy gases that had previously been incorrectly considered as ‘‘permanent gases.’’ It appeared that in order to liquefy these gases, temperature had to be decreased considerably (oxygen 90 K, nitrogen 78 K, hydrogen 20 K, helium 4 K). In the end it was the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) who first succeeded in liquefying helium, the gas with the lowest boiling point of all (Van Delft, 2007). The Quest for Absolute Zero exhibition had been organized to mark the centenary of this scientific breakthrough in 2008. For a variety of scientific reasons, reaching ever lower temperatures has continued to engage physicists ever since. A relatively recent milestone was achieved in 1995, when American physicists actualised Bose–Einstein condensation (at less than 200 nanokelvin above absolute zero), in which matter behaves in a complete new manner, already predicted by Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974) in 1925. By focussing on the competition among scientists to achieve such milestones (without ignoring the scientific contents), the exhibition was accessible and exciting even for visitors not well versed in physics (see Fig. 4). The objects on show in the exhibition suffered from a characteristic modern heritage lack of expressive power. Among the highlights were the robust evaporation vessels of Kamerlingh Onnes’ cryogenic laboratory, a piece of glass in which helium had been solidified, a tin coil from the early days of superconductivity research and the hermetic setups of the Dutch Bose–Einstein pioneer Jook Walraven. These objects were brought to life by giving them a place in the storyline, as tangible expressions of the successes and failures in the quest for absolute zero. The role these objects played in this story determined their historical significance. A context was created by using such devices as animations, hands-on games, film fragments, photographic blow-ups, spoken text, and a powerful exhibition design. Apart from explaining scientific and technical principles, the contextual material was geared to evoking the human aspects and emotions in the history of modern cryogenics, showing that this approach does not necessarily lead to a display that is ‘‘overcontextualised . . . musty with documentation, laden with earnest didacticism’’ (Vergo, 1989, p. 51). Another widespread prejudice about contextualization, that the objects lose their central position and are, almost by definition, marginalised (Vergo, 1989, p. 51; Witcomb, 2003, p. 117), could also be expelled. This is illustrated

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Fig. 4. View of quest for absolute zero.

by the transformation to key object of the top item in the exhibition: Kamerlingh Onnes’ helium liquefactor, by which means the ‘‘Mount Everest of cryogenics’’ was conquered on 10 July 1908. If this artefact had been simply presented as a more or less isolated object (as is normally the case in the permanent exhibition), its showcase text would have informed the visitor he was looking at the instrument in which helium had been liquefied for the first time at a record cold of 4 K (see Fig. 5). However, this piece of information only partly succeeds in making the visitor aware of the significance of the object. The exhibition afforded the visitor a different view of the object, which now was presented as the absolute climax of a decades-long international scientific race to be the first. The visitor was now made intimately aware of Kamerlingh Onnes’ efforts, the many years of hard work, the technical and scientific progress made by him and his fellow competitors, his ingenuity and his perseverance—all of which lie behind this apparatus. The visitor’s awareness of the historical significance of the object will only have been enhanced by this contextualized approach. The main risk of using contextual material is that the presence of the scientific artefacts (which as a rule have not been made to please) will be diminished by an all-powerful design. Quest for Absolute Zero was a success, both in terms of visitor numbers and positive responses, and successfully challenged any scepticism in the museum regarding exhibitions on modern scientific topics . We do not pretend to have introduced a revolutionary new concept with the Quest for Absolute Zero. An exhibition like Empires of Physics, which was organized in the Whipple Museum in 1993, for instance, already appears to have pursued an organic way of putting objects in a powerfully contextualized environment (cf. Bennett et al., 1993; Bennett, 1995). A compelling storyline (the theme was physics and society in the second half of the nineteenth century) dictated the positioning of the objects. What we do intend to propose is to define the ‘‘key piece’’ approach as a particular way of handling objects in an exhibition, one which is opposed to its ideal type counterpart, the showpiece approach, and to argue its suitability for modern heritage specifically. 6. Acquisition of modern heritage—the Unilever collection

Fig. 5. Kamerlingh Onnes’ first helium liquefactor (V09687).

In 1999, Museum Boerhaave acquired a large collection of more than five hundred chemical objects from the Royal Dutch Chemical Society (Koninklijke Nederlandse Chemische Vereniging). The collec-

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Fig. 6. The Unilever collection as we found it in a damp attic on the premises of the Unilever laboratory.

tion mainly consisted of anonymous and unrelated pieces (measuring cups, Erlenmeyer flasks, recorders, colorimeters, and so on) and, to be honest, without any obvious visual attraction. The museum accepted them because they were types of instruments not yet present in the collection. Seen from the key object perspective it was a pointless acquisition. Anyone would agree that the objects are a key to—almost—nothing. An example of a historical episode which endows modern instruments with meaning is that of the Unilever research laboratory of Vlaardingen (a town close to Rotterdam), or Unilever Research & Development Vlaardingen (URDV) as it is currently officially named. The collection of this laboratory, which was offered to Museum Boerhaave a few years ago, clearly reflects the challenges put to museums by modern heritage: it consists largely of unattractive, mass-produced bulk instruments, boxes with plugs which the average lay visitor finds it hard to understand (even though these instruments will undoubtedly stir a sense of nostalgia in former users). The reason to accept a selection of these instruments is that they capture the story of one of the most influential research laboratories in the Netherlands. The big question, in view of the fact that almost all of the objects lacked expressiveness and uniqueness, was how to make a prudent selection, how to separate the wheat from the chaff? What was the wheat and what the chaff? The story of Unilever commences around 1900 when the German chemist Wilhelm Normann (1870–1939) devised a method to harden oils. His invention made it possible to make a butter-like substance out of vegetable oils: margarine. In the Netherlands, Samuel van den Bergh (1864–1941) and Anton Jurgens (1867– 1945) were among the most successful pioneers of margarine.

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After having been the fiercest of competitors for many years, they decided to join forces in 1927. The amalgamated company was named Margarine Unie, which in turn merged three years later with the British company Lever Brothers. This merger gave birth to Unilever (see: Wilson, 1970, for the standard history of Unilever). Through the years, the multinational has grown into one of the world’s largest producers of food, household and personal products. Well-known Unilever food brands are Lipton, Becel, Bertolli and Ola; among the range of personal care products are products like Lux and Rexona, major household products are Surf and Sunlight. At present Unilever has six principal research and development centres. In addition to the Dutch laboratory, there are two research centres in the United Kingdom, one in the United States, one in China, and one in India. From the historical point of view the Vlaardingen laboratory is the most significant one, together with the British laboratory in Port Sunlight, which specialized in detergents. The objects from the Unilever collection date mostly from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. A few objects originate from before the laboratory in Vlaardingen opened its doors in 1956 (Boekenoogen & Taylor, 1966). As I mentioned before, we were looking for ‘‘key objects’’ which were typical of Unilever’s research particularly in the 1950s to the 1970s. Such key objects must have a strong relation with the eyecatching products of Unilever research. A traditional focus of the Unilever laboratory in Vlaardingen was margarine: its components, its manufacture (‘‘hardening’’) and its characteristics, especially its nutritional value, taste (and aroma), perishability, physical-mechanical features like spreadability, and health aspects. In the field of soap, improving detergents and colour research were of particular importance (Boekenoogen & Taylor, 1966; Unilever Food and URDV Communication, 2008; Wilson 1970, pp. 72–99). The company carried out analytical chemical research into both taste and health aspects of margarine and other fat products. Unilever, then, was fully committed to the analytical chemical ‘‘revolution’’ of the 1950s and 1960s. Instrumental analysis based on new methods developed rapidly in this period, especially gas and liquid chromatography (GLC), mass spectrometry, and electron spin and nuclear magnetic resonance (De Galan, 2004). Already before commercial instruments began to appear on the market, Unilever’s laboratory director Jan Boldingh (1915–2003) and his team were constructing their own gas chromatographs, NMR apparatus, and mass spectrographs. The Unilever laboratory was the first on the European continent to introduce GLC technologies. The Unilever heritage includes column parts of a gas chromatograph made by Geo Dijkstra (b. 1923) (V33983),6 who did important work in connecting GLC to mass spectrography. When the instrument manufacturers Pye presented the first commercial argon GLC in the autumn of 1958, Unilever instantly bought 17 copies. One surviving apparatus has been added to the Museum Boerhaave collection (V33590) (Bennett, 1986; De Galan, 2004, pp. 89 and 93–96; Keuning, 1996; Wilson, 1970, pp. 72–99). With the help of GLC, flavour components in butter could be separated and identified. The most important result was the identification of delta-lactones as crucial butter flavour components. Unilever managed to synthesize delta lactones ahead of other manufacturers and has been cashing in on its leading position (Haring, 2001). In terms of health effects, Unilever’s most resounding success was Becel (or Flora, as the product is called in some countries), one of the first linoleic-containing margarines. The focus of research has increasingly shifted to the reduction of salt, bad fats, and sugar in food products. Besides analytical chemical research, animal tests have also been conducted to investigate health effects. We selected for in-

The object can be found by introducing the inventory number in the online database of Museum Boerhaave: http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/collectie/zoeken/.

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Fig. 7. pH meter, not selected for the Museum Boerhaave collection.

stance a centrifuge for the determination of the hematocrit concentration in blood (V34023), which was probably instrumental in studying the blood of animals which had been fed on varying proportions of fat components (not only animals were used by the way: once a group of monks proved willing to participate in fat research during a fasting period). To register the functioning of the heart of test animals in the 1980s, a ‘‘Cardiofax’’ was used: V33973. Edible fats must not only be tasty and healthy, their texture is also important. Margarine must be spreadable and should not be too soft or too hard, when taken straight out of the refrigerator. It should not melt or fall off the knife: the ‘‘melting path’’ is an important parameter. The Unilever collection comprises quite a few instruments to test such physical–mechanical properties (often constructed in the laboratory’s own workshop), like penetrometers, dilatometers, viscometers, microscopes (to study surfaces), and instruments to determine the melting point. Physical-mechanical instruments have also been used for the research on washing powders—after margarine the second important research focus of the Vlaardingen scientists. Soap and margarine do not seem to have much in common, yet detergents used to be extracted from animal fat. Fat, therefore, is the historical connection between the two products. Physical–mechanical instruments, such as X-ray diffraction setups, were used to investigate the texture of washing powder grains (Unilever X-ray diffraction camera: V33929). The most important areas of improvement with regard to detergents involved increasing their concentration and having them work at ever lower temperatures (with positive economic and environmental effects). Another important element of course is that detergents should keep white laundry white, but not bleach the coloured laundry. A range of instruments testify to the ongoing efforts in the field of colorimetrics (such as whiteness meter V33593). Colorimeters, which also go under names like tintometers, have also been deployed for studying the colour of oil and margarine. Museum Boerhaave thus acquired a case with liquid colour samples which, judging from the colour of the liquids will have been used to research these kinds of products (V33930). According to a former Unilever researcher, another colorimeter (V33924) was an oil colorimeter that was used in the development of a deep frying fat which in the Netherlands was marketed under the brand name Diamant and which for marketing reasons needed to be bright white. It may also be of interest to dwell briefly on the chaff rather than the wheat: the objects that were not selected. All kinds of anonymous pH meters, resistance banks, and volt meters that are not typical of Unilever research were discarded, even if they represented a type of instrument not yet present in our collection (we

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took photographs of some of the discarded objects to illustrate our choices—see Fig. 7). Apart from their lack of expressive power, there is also the problem of excess collecting: the sky’s the limit when a curator starts hoarding modern material, and tries to collect instruments in all shapes and sizes. In our view this is not a sensible approach to collecting modern heritage. As the key piece approach puts much emphasis on the organic interplay of objects, context, and story, the acquisition of the Unilever collection was not completed after the objects had been selected and registered in the museum’s database. Specialist literature and interviews with former Unilever laboratory staff helped to select the objects and to record the story of the Unilever research laboratory and the ‘‘biographies’’ of the objects (as has been briefly described in this section). In addition, we have started to collect contextual material like photographs and manuals, which is currently in progress. 7. Conclusion Söderqvist, Bencard, and Mordhorst (2009) have noted an interesting paradox concerning modern heritage which museums of medicine (and science) have to face: whereas science and medicine more and more affect society and our private lives, the artefacts themselves become less and less displayable. Molecularization, automatization, digitization and miniaturization have among other things created a material (and partly non-material) culture, the essence of which is not collectable and displayable as material artefacts. In their words: ‘‘[t]he objects of modern biomedicine are disappearing from the realm of the senses.’’ Indeed, biomedical technologies such as molecular therapy, in which drugs in the form of pills are able to conduct a kind of biomedical microsurgery, are pregnant examples of the formidable difficulties facing curators wishing to present such modern issues in a museum context. Söderqvist et al. maintain (with a touch of irony) that exhibiting these pills would be pointless: ‘‘A museum curator could, of course, put a pill on a piece of black cloth under a spotlight and play a recorded deep voice telling the visitor that it gave AstraZeneca eight billion US dollars in revenue in the year 2000 only.’’ Such stories could be better told in books, they maintain. The example of the pill on the black cloth, however, implies that their main point of reference is the individual object. They see an apparently unbridgeable gap between the intangible and unrecognizable modern artefacts and the robust (older) objects (amputation saws, forceps) that have, in their terminology (following Gumbrecht), ‘‘presence effects.’’ A beginning of a solution might be found by using an approach in which the value of an object depends less on its charismatic qualities. In this paper, I have distinguished two ideal types with to regard objects. The first one, the showpiece approach, relies on the intrinsic qualities of an object, its ‘‘charisma.’’ In displaying and collecting material, the focus in this approach is on the individual object. In the ‘‘key piece’’ approach, the object is first of all considered as part of a story: the object is collected and exhibited in a more organic manner, together with contextual material, as part of a storyline. Usually history of science museums unintentionally combine the showpiece and key piece approaches, though with an emphasis still on the first. I have suggested that especially in the case of modern heritage, in which the objects generally do not have much expressive power, deploying the ‘‘key piece’’ approach in a deliberate manner might be able to assist museums to purposefully collect and display objects. Moreover, treating objects as ‘‘key pieces’’ seems to anticipate the development in recent decades, in which the materiality of objects has lost some of its significance.

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