Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
buildings that looked like cathedrals, and were visited and venerated like shrines. It is from the turn of the present century that the science museum - in its two principal forms - begins to acquire modern dress. Nowhere is this more fashionably vivid than at South Kensington, in Stockholm, at the Smithsonian in Washington, and in Munich at Oskar von Miller's Deutsches Museum, founded in 1908. In some cases, like the Grand Palais and Petit Palais of Paris, these arose in the course of international exhibitions - the Loan Collection on which the London Science Museum is based, and the Sydney's Powerhouse, are good examples, while the Smithsonian retains even today its token tribute to the "Arts and Industries" of the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. In each case, technology is linked to the object and to its audience - demonstrably, in the case of the international exhibition, to the consumer and customer. In these cases, objects and their classification reflect Spencerian passages from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from generálist to specialist, from genuinely private to ostentatiously public, from the province of elite amusement to the domain of mass production. The museum continues and makes permanent the exhibition message of Science applied to Profit, as well as to human Progress - it represents nothing less than "the relentless march of industrial society" 14 - a lesson made clear in the close cohabitation between the displays of international exhibitions and the inauguration of department stores. The objects of science and technology - man-made or natural, become fossilised information, a pre-postmodernist cornucopia of consumption, valued and classified in order to be better consumed, within a political and moral economy that encourages competition, best practice, and the power of organised knowledge to alter the world. With hindsight, it is clear that such representations ran the implict risk of becoming overtaken, even rendered outmoded, by the very technologies they celebrated. But the simpler messages linger for generations within the museum world, which by the 1930s becomes also an increasingly closed world, co-opted by dominant metaphors - whether cultural, capitalist, socialist - and ideological icons of national competition. Who can fail to remember the brilliant National Museum of Romania in Bucharest, where alongside magnificent collections of artifacts from the Dacian peoples were, in Ceaceascu's time, displays in the science division proposing Romanians as the first inventors of the automobile and pioneers of manned flight. Across the Atlantic, from DuPont to Detroit and Burlington Mill (New York), and from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, an equivalent enthusiasm proclaimed a "technological utopianism"
