The Royal Institution’s archive and heritage collection offers a unique lens to explore the intersection of key scientific people and heritage scientific instruments from this inclusive and unique place in science communication history.
This talk shall explore, and celebrate, key moments in the Christmas Lectures and Discourses, both started in 1825. These are still delivered to engage the modern public in science, using lectures and scientific demos to break apart complex ideas and empower people to explore and get involved in science.
With successful collaborations between the science engagement, and archive and heritage teams, we shall also see how the integration of scientific instruments from across the last 200 years have been used to illuminate the public in scientific and educational practices, and to highlight the significance of the instruments and their own history.
Using popular examples we will discover how the Royal Institution has brought science to life for audiences of all ages and backgrounds for 225 years, and into the future.

Scientific communication has been the remit of the Royal Institution since its founding in 1799. However, at the heart of this communication has been collaboration. This is the collaboration between the scientist, their peers, their instrument makers, correspondents and ultimately the audience itself.

Participation in collaborative projects such as John Tyndall’s correspondence or the digitisation of Humphry Davy’s Notebooks, as well as ongoing internal collections work has helped to further improve our understanding of these aspects of collaboration from the Ri’s history. For instance, recent identification of a selection of Charles Woodward’s lantern slides within the collection, undoubtedly used in his 1837 Friday Evening Discourse on ‘A Demonstration of the General Laws and Properties of Polarized Light Illustrated by the Hydro-Oxygen Apparatus and Models’ has highlighted his work on early image projection for audience benefit as well as his interaction with Michael Faraday before and after his lecture and in his capacity as President of the Islington Literary and Scientific Institution.

This talk will bring forth and highlight some of these uncovered partnerships and exchanges which are important to our understanding of the Ri’s place in scientific development and communication as we head into the Ri’s celebrations of 200 year of Christmas Lectures and Friday Evening Discourses. Using the scientific instruments and archives to uncover and celebrate the past, present, and future collaborations to continue our air of communication for ‘the common purposes of life’.

In the early discovery of electrodynamics, new physical phenomena were often communicated through shared demonstration. One notable example was Faraday’s miniature working motor that he shipped to scientists throughout Europe with his news of his discovery. Ampère too devised new apparatus to demonstrate his new understanding of the laws of nature. So potent were Ampères demonstrations, that the field of electrodynamics was launched with the foundation of Ampere’s table. The first text on electrodynamics, written by J.F. Demonferrand and its English translation by James Cumming in the late 1820s, relied entirely upon a series of shared demonstrations that educators could demonstrate and communicate science to other scientists and students. This talk will discuss the evolution of Ampere’s table as a shared demonstration of science communication, from Ampère's individual experiments to his initial concept of a demonstration table, to the one that Demonferrand and Cumming used to teach electrodynamics to the masses. It builds on research from Ampère’s own work, demonstrative exhibits from the Ampère Musem and reconstruction of the seminal experiments. Ampere’s table was so useful for science communication that it continued to be the mainstay for communicating and teaching electrodynamics throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s. One of the last examples, which was used at a teaching school until the 1950s, is now housed at the Ampère Museum.

In my presentation, I will explore the physics lecture theatre of the late 19th and 20th century as an important space for the performance of scientific instruments. While historians of science have identified the laboratory and the field as the primary arenas that defined the development and the use of scientific instruments, lecture halls other than anatomical theatres have largely been overlooked. Between the 1860s and 1914, physics lecture theatres in Germany became highly sophisticated architectural spaces with a complex infrastructure to satisfy elaborate teaching experiments and demonstrations. The 19th century physics lecture theatre was transformed in interwar Germany through the adaptation of new instruments and practices of lecture demonstrations. I will conclude with the struggle of West German faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in the 1960s to establish German instruments and methods of teaching physics in India along with a specific architecture of teaching spaces.
The ultimate failure of a linear transfer of German teaching instruments, spaces and methods to South India underscores the social and cultural embeddedness of scientific and technical education and its epistemic practices. Moving from Wilhelmine Germany to the interwar period and the Cold War, and from the postwar Federal Republic of Germany to post-independence India will allow me to show how the transformation of the lecture theatre as a knowledge space has been an integral part of a larger narrative of political, social, technological, and epistemological continuities, changes, and boundaries.