Narratives of Science and Practice in Mid 19th Century Britain

Project Team:

Principal Investigator:

Dr Robert Bud, Science Museum

Image credit: James Watt, British engineer, as a young man, c 1769. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

Award Information:

‘Narratives of science and practice in mid-nineteenth century Britain’ will explore the period when concepts of ‘Applied science’ came to be widely used. Using recently-digitised 19th-century newspapers and periodicals and drawing on methods developed in literature, folklore and organisational studies, the project will focus on the allegorical narratives used to interpret these concepts. The stories uncovered by the project will feed into the design of a major new gallery in the Science Museum in 2014.