Technology and Culture

By Colin Divall
With a collection dating back to the 1920s, the London Transport Museum can rightly claim to be one of the world’s finest museums of urban transport.

Maria Paula Diogo
Portuguese museums that date from the turn of the twentieth century differ greatly from those developed in the 1980s and 1990s. For some fifty years prior to the Carnation Revolution of 1974–76, Portugal was ruled by a dictatorship little interested in the preservation of the country’s scientific, technical, and industrial heritage. With two [...]

Stephen Richards
Since it returned from the Falkland Islands in 1970, the SS Great Britain has been a powerful symbol for the city of Bristol and its maritime history. The ship was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was launched at Bristol in 1843; she was both the world’s largest ship and the first screw-propelled ocean-going [...]

By Bruce Epperson
Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. But recently a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses’s public works projects, summed up the extent to which historians’ perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.

By Anna Storm and Nina Wormbs
In 2006, Tom Tits Experiment, a science center located south of Stockholm in Södertälje, Sweden, received the European Museum Forum’s Micheletti Award, a prize established in 1996 that goes to the year’s most promising technical or industrial museum. How does a hands-on science center capture a prize intended for technology museums?