Description
The Science Museum on Exhibition Road, in South Kensington, is London's great museum of science and technology: steam engines, a spacecraft that went to the Moon, early computers and full-size aircraft, in galleries where families can happily spend a day.
Entry is free, as in all of Britain's national museums, and it is one of the city's most visited attractions. Here, the milestones of modern life stand side by side.
On the ground floor, the Energy Hall is a hall of steam engines that tell the story of the Industrial Revolution, including the oldest surviving beam engine by James Watt. Nearby is his attic workshop, sealed at his death in 1819 and rebuilt with over 8,300 of its objects.
Making the Modern World lines up the museum's most remarkable pieces along one timeline: Puffing Billy, the oldest surviving steam locomotive, Crick's model of the double helix, a V-2 rocket and the Apollo 10 command module, which circled the Moon 31 times in 1969.
Upstairs, the Flight gallery holds full-size planes and helicopters, from the Vickers Vimy of Alcock and Brown's transatlantic flight in 1919 to a Spitfire, a Hurricane and a cross-section of a Boeing 747.
Children head for Wonderlab, where explainers run live experiments and shows, and for Power Up, where they can play on over 150 game consoles. The Information Age gallery tells two centuries of communications and computing, and the medicine galleries, with over 3,000 objects, fill the first floor.
The museum was born in 1857 from the Great Exhibition's leftovers, as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum. Science and art shared a roof until Queen Victoria asked for the museum to bear her name and Albert's.
The art kept the name; in 1909 science went its own way. Its building opened in stages from 1919, and in 1931 it tried something new: a Children's Gallery with exhibits to touch, an idea that lives on in Wonderlab.
Two of its exhibits carry a royal and a mathematical surprise. Elizabeth II opened the Information Age gallery in 2014 by sending her first tweet from it. And on a staircase landing stands a working Difference Engine No. 2, designed by Charles Babbage and finally built by the museum in 1991, for the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Entry is free, as in all of Britain's national museums, and it is one of the city's most visited attractions. Here, the milestones of modern life stand side by side.
On the ground floor, the Energy Hall is a hall of steam engines that tell the story of the Industrial Revolution, including the oldest surviving beam engine by James Watt. Nearby is his attic workshop, sealed at his death in 1819 and rebuilt with over 8,300 of its objects.
Making the Modern World lines up the museum's most remarkable pieces along one timeline: Puffing Billy, the oldest surviving steam locomotive, Crick's model of the double helix, a V-2 rocket and the Apollo 10 command module, which circled the Moon 31 times in 1969.
Upstairs, the Flight gallery holds full-size planes and helicopters, from the Vickers Vimy of Alcock and Brown's transatlantic flight in 1919 to a Spitfire, a Hurricane and a cross-section of a Boeing 747.
Children head for Wonderlab, where explainers run live experiments and shows, and for Power Up, where they can play on over 150 game consoles. The Information Age gallery tells two centuries of communications and computing, and the medicine galleries, with over 3,000 objects, fill the first floor.
The museum was born in 1857 from the Great Exhibition's leftovers, as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum. Science and art shared a roof until Queen Victoria asked for the museum to bear her name and Albert's.
The art kept the name; in 1909 science went its own way. Its building opened in stages from 1919, and in 1931 it tried something new: a Children's Gallery with exhibits to touch, an idea that lives on in Wonderlab.
Two of its exhibits carry a royal and a mathematical surprise. Elizabeth II opened the Information Age gallery in 2014 by sending her first tweet from it. And on a staircase landing stands a working Difference Engine No. 2, designed by Charles Babbage and finally built by the museum in 1991, for the 200th anniversary of his birth.