Gouyon, Jean-Baptiste;
(2014)
‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965.
Science Museum Group Journal
, 1
(01)
10.15180/140105.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965 |
| Location: | UK |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.15180/140105 |
| Publisher version: | https://dx.doi.org/10.15180/140105 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | The Science Museum Group Journal is an open-access publication, meaning that its content is freely available to anyone, anywhere. It is committed to providing, via its own website or via third-party distributors, immediate and unrestricted access to the final published version of its articles. These are made available using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which conforms to the most widely accepted definition of open access. This allows for the use, copying, reproduction and adaptation of articles, free of charge, so long as the appropriate citation information is used and on the understanding that third-party material included in the article, such as images or multimedia, may not always be licensable in the same way. Wherever it is reasonably practicable for us to do so, we will signpost any third-party material contained in our articles that may be subject to different licensing restrictions. Copyright in the content of and publishing rights to all articles is retained by their authors. All images provided by the Science Museum Group/Science & Society Picture Library (SSPL) are provided under the CC BY NC licence for the benefit of the Journal and its readership. The entire SSPL catalogue can be found on the SSPL website. |
| Keywords: | Freedom 7, Henry Calvert, history of museum practices, Science Museum, Space exploration, visual sources |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10170555 |
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