The story
The Science Museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington is primarily a museum of science, engineering and medicine, and most visitors come for the machines. Puffing Billy, one of the oldest surviving steam locomotives, is here, along with the Apollo 10 command module that orbited the Moon 31 times in 1969, and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine he designed in the 1840s and the museum finally built in 1991. It began in 1857 as part of the South Kensington Museum, drawing on surplus from the Great Exhibition, and became a separate institution in 1909.
Art-seekers find pictures here because the collection records industry as people saw it. The best known is Coalbrookdale by Night, painted in 1801 by Philip James de Loutherbourg, a Strasbourg-born painter and stage designer working in London. It shows the Madeley Wood furnaces in the Shropshire gorge where iron-making was transformed in the 18th century, flames lighting the night sky, and it has become one of the standard images of the Industrial Revolution.
Portraits arrived with one of the founding collections, the bequest of Bennet Woodcroft, a patent official who assembled a gallery of inventors' faces. One of them, a copy made in 1860 after a portrait by Robert Fulton, shows Edmund Cartwright, the clergyman behind an early power loom. Fulton was still a painter when they met, and Cartwright helped persuade him to turn to engineering, the path that later took him to steamboats.
