Science Museum: Apollo 10 and Babbage's Engine
Why is it significant?
Pause outside the long stone front of the Science Museum and imagine everything inside it in one heap: steam engines, X-ray tubes, early computers, an iron lung, a jet engine, a capsule that has been to space.
Key Facts
| Place | Science Museum: Apollo 10 and Babbage's Engine |
|---|---|
| Address | Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.49740, -0.17470 |
| Part of Walk | Albertopolis: Prince Albert's London of Museums, Music and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Pause outside the long stone front of the Science Museum and imagine everything inside it in one heap: steam engines, X-ray tubes, early computers, an iron lung, a jet engine, a capsule that has been to space. The collection runs to hundreds of thousands of objects, and it began, like everything around you, as a spin-off of the Great Exhibition.
In 1857 the South Kensington Museum opened on this estate, showing art and science side by side. Only in 1909 did the scientific collections become a separate Science Museum, and the building in front of you opened in the 1920s. Among its oldest treasures is Puffing Billy, built around 1814 to haul coal wagons at Wylam Colliery in Northumberland, and now the oldest surviving steam locomotive in the world.
In the space gallery sits a small, scorched cone: the command module of Apollo 10. In May 1969, two months before Apollo 11, three astronauts flew it to the Moon and back as a full dress rehearsal, taking their lunar module down to around fifteen kilometres above the surface. The crew called the command module Charlie Brown and the lander Snoopy. Coming home, they hit nearly forty thousand kilometres an hour, a speed record for human beings.
Charles Babbage, the Victorian mathematician who designed mechanical computers but never managed to build them, appears here twice. To mark the bicentenary of his birth, the museum's engineers built the calculating section of his Difference Engine No. 2 from his original drawings, completing it in 1991: around four thousand parts in bronze, cast iron and steel. It worked, proving his design had been sound all along. And the museum also keeps, rather startlingly, half of Babbage's own brain... the other half belongs to the Royal College of Surgeons.
For more than a century and a half this was also home to Stephenson's Rocket, winner of the Rainhill Trials in 1829, until it recently moved north to the National Railway Museum in York. Now continue down Exhibition Road to the corner of Cromwell Road and turn right. You cannot miss the next stop: it looks like a cathedral, and it is full of bones.