Earth

 My favourite museum in London is actually a very, very small institution, while my favourite museum object sits in a case in one of the largest and busiest.  But my favourite single museum gallery is perhaps a quirky choice.  It’s in the Natural History Museum.  Not the dinosaurs, nor indeed any other of the Life galleries.  Instead, at the other end of the site, in the old Geological museum, now rebadged as the Earth galleries, there is a space that always captures my imagination.

It presents a multi-million year timeline that charts the story of the evolution of life with plate tectonics and the story of the changing earth.  It covers the various mass extinction events, and the changing atmosphere alongside the geological shifts.  A few years ago, it had a refresh, which to my mind dumbed it down a little, but it’s still pretty good.

Perhaps partly because of this, for the last few weeks I’ve been particularly enjoying the new Chris Packham documentary, “Earth” on the BBC.  The episodes don’t flow in chronical order, but mostly work back in time from the Permian mass extinction, covering snowball earth and the early development of the atmosphere along the way, before ending with the arrival and impact of humans.

It’s pretty good, and includes a lot of the newest science and archaeology.  Chris Packham, I think, does well as the presenter (I recognise he may be a little marmite for some). He is passionate, and cares about the stories he’s telling. 

Like all TV documentaries, it has its longueurs; as with most, there is a lot of standing around in beautiful places overseas and pointing.  But there feels, to me, to be more meat in it than in some of the recent Brian Cox shows, or even, dare I say, Attenboroughland.

The visual language of these documentaries was established, I guess, by Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” in the late 60s, and Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” a few years later.  The latter is being rebroadcast on BBC4, and is available on iPlayer, so I have had a look.  The visual language is indeed very similar, but it is much, much slower than the films we have today.  And of course some of the arguments are very dated now.

Anyway, I recommend the Packham series.  I think it’s worth the watch,

 

Shrimp at Horniman

 A new species has been found in the Horniman aquaria.  

The Guardian article is here...

Fifty Years On...

Fifty years ago today, I was told to go to bed.

I wasn't allowed to stay up and watch the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on TV.  I was quite annoyed about that.

Later, I remember going to see the tiny piece of moon rock in the the Geological Museum in South Kensington.  And later still, I joined the Astronomical Society of Haringey and met Arthur C. Clarke.

But, given that first landing 50 years ago, I needed a visit to South Kensington.

When you enter what is now a side entrance to the Natural History Museum, you are encouraged upwards.

But if you look around on the ground floor, you come across this:

This isn't the same sample as the one shown briefly in 1969, nor the later display in the 70s.  But it's still moon rock.

Then next door to the Science Museum...

The LEM is actually a copy of the original, made slightly smaller so that it can fit into the gallery.

But just along the way, in the 'Icons' exhibition, is the real thing.  Charlie Brown:

I asked one of the staff if it seemed likely that Snoopy had really been found.  She hedged her bets, and said that if it had, we wouldn't be going out to recapture it any time soon!

The Science Museum also, now, has its own sample of moon rock:

As an aside, the Apollo 10 capsule is surrounded by other numinous objects of space and technology interest.  Like these:

 The Flying Bedstead, that lead to the VTOL aircraft.

 Puffing Billy - the World's oldest surviving steam locomotive.

A V2 missile, as launched by Germany during WWII.

Anyway, having sated on things Apollo, I spent time exploring the museum further, as I hadn't been there for many years.  Foucault's Pendulum has been revamped, the Information Age gallery is new, and the Mathematics display have been completely refurbished.

And that is where a couple of other iconic objects can be found:

But there were other things of great interest, like the Bill Phillips model of the economy:

And the pioneering statistical work by Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale:

The space displays have also been updated in many parts, from a mockup of the Huygens lander:

To a huge replica of Bepicolombo:

But, in and amongst all this new material and the many refurbished displays (and I haven't yet mentioned the changes to the Energy gallery where the huge Watt and Newcomen engines are displayed, nor the special exhibition on driverless cars... They will have to be the subject of other posts. And I didn't go to the much hyped Apollo 11 film they are showing), it was good to find some things remained untouched, as I remembered them.

For example, a model credited to Mat Irvine:

And upstairs, in a corner, this:

Tour: Pont

North of Nîmes, we were told, is a huge Roman aqueduct: the Pont du Gard.  So we went to see it.

It really is huge.  A massive, impressive piece of engineered stonework - 49 metres high and 275 metres across - spanning the Gardon river near Remoulins.

Let us say again, it is shockingly large, and well preserved.

Planned to carry water across the river and its softly shelving banks.   People swam and kayaked underneath.

We were very impressed.  It equalled in amazingness the Arena at Nîmes   Another mammoth Roman engineering work.

It was a hot, hot day.  In fact it was very warm the whole time we were in the South of France.  A wall of heat that struck us as we emerged from the TGV and never let up.

So hot that we almost skipped the Visitor Centre a few hundred metres along on the other side of the river, and just headed back to town after our paddle.  But there was a cafe there, so after a brief internal tussle we went on.

And the Visitor Centre was very good, and comprehensive.  With lots about how Roman homes used water, and how the Pont du Gard was built, and -

Oh.

There is a Bob Shaw short story, called The Giaconda Caper, about the discovery that the Mona Lisa is just one of very many similar paintings by da Vinci, which he painted and placed together in an early-Renaissance zeotrope. to make a What The Butler Saw Machine.  The Mona Lisa is a renowned piece of art, of course, but Shaw's conceit it is just one small part of a much larger piece of original engineering.  Does this diminish the painting in the Louvre or does it make the engineering more marvellous? (Actually, Shaw doesn't really ask that question, instead he mostly plays the idea for laughs).

Anyway, the Pont du Gard is a bit like that.

Again, Oh.

Because what the Visitor Centre showed was that the Pont du Gard was just one of many bridges - admittedly the largest - that carried the aqueduct 50 km from the spring at  Uzès to Nîmes. There were long tunnels along the route as well.

An aqueduct is a built watercourse, taking water to where it is needed (in this case the castellum divisorium at Nîmes).

For the Pont du Gard to work at all the entry and exit points had to be perfectly adjusted, and the gradient maintained correctly from one end to the other.  But the engineering challenge was much more complex than that:-

The only suitable source that the engineers could find for the water supply of Nîmes was at Uzés, 25 km to the north at 72 m altitude. The problem was that the source was at only 11.8 m above the site of the future castellum divisorium (the water distribution basin) at Nîmes at 60 m altitude. It was therefore necessary to make the aqueduct as short as possible. A direct straight connection was not possible since the high hills of the garrigue de Nîmes, 200 m high, blocked the way. A 10 km long tunnel would have been necessary to overcome these hills. The only workable solution was a trajectory around these hills to the east, lengthening the aqueduct to 50 km. Here, there were two other major difficulties; first of all the Gardon river, which runs in a deep gorge, would have to be bridged. Upstream this could be done with a low bridge, but this would lengthen the trajectory. A choice was therefore made to bridge the gorge along the most direct route, and where the gorge was relatively narrow. As a consequence the bridge, the future Pont du Gard, had to be higher than anything previously built, nearly 50 metres high and 300m long. A siphon, known from other aqueducts, could not be used here since it needs a sizeable difference in altitude between abutments to create sufficient water flow through the pipes, and this was not possible here. 

A second problem was a lake on the trajectory which was at 67 metres, 3 metres ABOVE the projected level of the aqueduct. To circumvent this lake, another 20 km had to be added to the trajectory and this was out of the question; this lake therefore had to be emptied and drained before the aqueduct could be built. Finally, to make the trajectory as short as possible, a large number of minor bridges had to be built and several tunnels, up to 400 m long had to be dug. The result is an aqueduct of 50 km long with a mean gradient of 34-25 cm/km (about 0,03%), with a maximum of 45 cm/km near the source and near Nîmes, and only 8 cm/km in the long central section! To build an aqueduct in rough hilly, forested terrain without GPS or modern measuring equipment with such a low gradient is one of the greatest feats of Roman engineering recorded to date. (Roman Aqueducts Web site)

And they made it work. It kept the city in water.  And when it went wrong (and it did), they fixed it, adjusting the engineering and the technology.  They were clearly good at public administration too.

The Pont du Gard is an impressive monument, even now.  A World Heritage Site.  But it was just part of a much larger, elegant, complex and adventurous civil engineering masterpiece.

Museum of the Year Shortlist

Fantastic!  The shortlist for the 2013 Museum of the Year includes Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Horniman amongst the last 10.

Unfortunately no mention of the Brunel House Museum (which won a different award in 2010) - nor the Nunhead and District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery. 

Perhaps another year?

O Beamish!

For various reasons we were in the North East late last August, as demonstrated by the bridges.  So on the late Summer Bank Holiday we decided - despite the rain - to go to the open air museum at Beamish.

Beamish celebrates and records the lost industrial and agricultural past of the North East of England.  But it does so by recreating a landscape through which visitors can walk and explore.  Like the confectioners above, which in addition to selling sweets from jars, has a sweet-making workshop in the back, where various flavours of boiled sweets are produced.  This requires large amounts of molten sugar, pulled around like taffy and flavoured as it cools, and then cut in to lozenges for the pleasure of the customers.  Hot, and amazing.

 Elsewhere there are mineworkings, miners cottages, a chapel and school, actors selling things and so forth...

While Beamish occupies a big area, it is still walkable, but most people seem to want to use the trams and buses and carts that travel around the different locations on the site. 

There are indoor bits (where we sheltered when the rain got too bad)...

... as did some other residents...

And of course, as you might expect, there is a little bit of heritage steam railway to have a go on.

Although to be fair, not every heritage steam railway has a replica of Puffing Billy!