My inner librarian is revealed
Waiting at the staff entrance of the Natural History Museum in London for my host to come and collect me, it struck me how much influence that iconic building, and the neighbouring Science Museum, has had on my life. As a child I used to come up to the museum on my birthday, where I spent hours staring at the suspended giants in the whale room, marvelling at the extinct dodo that looked ready to march out of its glass coffin, and nagging my mum to buy me a plastic dinosaur.
So I was genuinely excited when mineralogist Paul Schofield offered to show me what happens behind the scenes at the museum. For me, one of the great perks of my job at Diamond is the opportunity to go and visit scientists at their own institutions, nose around their labs and try to understand more about what they do and how they do it. It’s a kind of science voyeurism, checking out other people’s equipment.
Entering the basement of the museum leads to a wave of nostalgia, as the entire corridor wall is lined with neat mahogany cases containing little drawers, each with a carefully handwritten label. This is part of the museum’s rock collection, now hidden from public view, and it includes rocks brought back by adventurers such as Scott, Shackleton and Darwin, neatly packaged and chronologically ordered. In total the mineral collection numbers 180,000, with an additional 1880 meteorite specimens.
Next to Paul’s office there is a room full of filing cabinets, which contains X-ray diffraction patterns of every single mineral specimen in the museum collection, again with carefully handwritten records linking them to the specimen. The films date back to 1937, including some patterns collected by William Bragg, part of the father and son team who pioneered the technique of X-ray crystallography. Up until the 1980s the museum accommodated a whole team of crystallographers who painstakingly collected each film on laboratory X-ray sources.
In the early days, crystallography wasn’t the safest career choice, and it’s a bit shocking to see the historical X-ray cameras where the beam was aligned by the crystallographer putting their eye into the beam to detect fluorescence on the retina.
Due to advances in crystallography and rapid digital data collection, not to mention the unavailability of X-ray film and reduced number of additions of minerals to the collection, the filing cabinets are no longer updated. X-ray studies are still carried out at the museum, and detailed studies on particularly interesting specimens are carried out at synchrotrons. However they are an important and fascinating historical record, and for me, this is just as inspiring as the interactive displays in the museum above.
What a great memory! Is the basement of the museum still open to all?
Sadly not, the basement is where the researchers hang out, you can only get to visit by invitation. Which is a shame, there is some fantastic stuff down there!
We can’t get into the basement, but those who are coming on the London science tour ahead of our science blogging conference, can get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Darwin Centre – an annexe of the NHM. Pickled giant squid and other delights await.
The big geek in me just jumped for joy. I am very much looking forward to the pickled giant squid. Giant pickled squid? Regardless, I have been vaguely following the live dissection of the most recent specimen and am very excited to see a real giant squid for myself.