MUSEUM
The Museum of the History of Science Oxford is home to Albert Einstein's Blackboard from his second lecture at Oxford and it alone was enough for me to walk in. However the museum holds much more than one artifact in fact in holds exactly 18,465 important science artifacts. Located across the street from iconic Oxford bookstore “Blackwells”, it is one of the best science museums in the world.
Even if you spend ten minutes in the museum you will still get a lot out of it. Besides the blackboard some of the other more important objects in the museum are the samples of penicillium being cultivated by Oxford professors in their successful efforts to mass produce penicillin for WWII. Oxfords efforts in the mass production gave the Allied forces a secret weapon and saved many soldiers lives from injuries which would have meant certain death in the first of the World Wars.
The building in which the museum resides was home in the 1600’s to the Ashmolean museum which was actually the first museum ever to be built which had a purpose. The Ashmolean museum was moved to another part of oxford however most of the artifacts from the Ashmolean eventually found a home in the Natural History museum in Oxford. One of the exhibits from the old Ashmolean was a collection from a well known Naturalist, and world traveler named John Tradescant. It found its home in the Oxford museum of Natural History, however when the museum of Natural History closed temporarily this year, the collection got to (temporarily) reside in its original home The Museum of The History of Science ( Originally the Ashmolean). The collection is really quite exquisite and features one of Darwin’s specimens.
Museum of The Month
History of Science Museum Oxford
By Peter Smith