Jim Bennett, who has died of most cancers aged 76, made important contributions to the research of previous science and to the stewardship of scientific heritage. As director of two historical past of science museums, certainly one of them in Cambridge and the opposite in Oxford, he curated 35 exhibitions, authored a whole lot of scholarly and well-liked works, and made a number of appearances on the BBC Radio 4 present In Our Time. Jim was a modest, witty man who helped carry a few quiet revolution in our understanding of previous science, changing a staid historical past of concepts with a imaginative and prescient of science as a vigorous and ingenious observe.
This imaginative and prescient was not all the time understood by his much less imaginative critics. In 1988, Boris Johnson, then an obscure hack on the Each day Telegraph, attacked Jim for accepting into the Whipple Museum of the Historical past of Science in Cambridge a big assortment of pocket digital calculators. What subsequent, Johnson requested: egg whisks? Odd socks? Jim’s measured response epitomised his ethos as a curator and historian. The calculators had been certainly “nugatory in a way, as a result of nobody desires them” – however that was exactly why it “was important to maintain a set of them”.
Museum artefacts, Jim argued, don’t achieve their worth solely from their rarity or their magnificence. Particularly within the case of scientific objects, it’s by means of the research of their use that we discover essentially the most to be taught. Jim’s profession was devoted to creating this level extra extensively identified.
From 1994, as director of the Museum of the Historical past of Science at Oxford College, Jim was in command of a extra spectacular assortment than in Cambridge, however one which was then little utilized by the general public. He quickly modified that, stewarding a renovation of the positioning and rising customer numbers sevenfold. His exhibitions additionally grew in ambition and recognition, with greater than 70,000 individuals having fun with one significantly memorable present within the winter of 2009: the world’s first museum show of Steampunk artwork.
Amongst fellow curators, Jim is probably finest remembered for his spectacular 2005 present marking the centenary of the Particular Concept of Relativity – a topic seemingly impervious to the strategies of gallery show. Jim solely had one artefact to work with: a blackboard carrying the scrawled equations of Albert Einstein, retained in Oxford as a type of relic following the nice physicist’s go to there in 1931. Jim brilliantly inverted the main focus of the exhibition in the direction of the bodily act of communication, inviting an eclectic group of notable individuals, together with Tony Benn, Brian Eno and Cornelia Parker, to chalk on new blackboards precisely matching Einstein’s. The present grew to become as a lot about fame and classroom nostalgia as anybody individual’s genius.
The son of Peggy (nee McCune) and Jimmy Bennett, Jim was born in Belfast, the place his father labored as a mechanical fitter on the plane producer Quick & Harland. Jim studied at Grosvenor highschool earlier than coming into Clare School, Cambridge, taking his BA in pure sciences in 1969 and finishing a PhD within the historical past of science 5 years later, subsequently printed as The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren (1982). Stints educating in Aberdeen and dealing because the archivist to the Royal Astronomical Society in London led him to his true vocation as a curator working with scientific artefacts, first on the Nationwide Maritime Museum in Greenwich after which, from 1979 to 1994, because the director of the Whipple Museum.
As a researcher Jim had an abiding curiosity within the working lives of “practitioners”, women and men of science who made and used instruments for getting on on the earth. In his exhibitions, he used these lives to make a degree that was then nonetheless a lot ignored: that almost all of what we now decide to be “science” concerned the manipulation of devices in the direction of sensible ends.
He had a present for explaining clearly how such gadgets labored and for concocting imaginative shows that introduced the general public into the worlds the place they had been used. So guests to 1900: The New Age (1994), for instance, entered through a working duplicate of HG Wells’s time machine, which transported its passengers again to the bustling centre of the Exposition Universelle world’s truthful held in 1900 in Paris, the place they may view among the cutting-edge devices that had been placed on public present after which get their pictures taken and their very important measurements recorded within the model of the period’s new science of criminology.
Jim retired from Oxford in 2012, transferring to grow to be visiting keeper on the Science Museum from 2013 to 2015, contributing to a number of main new reveals there. He remained a really lively scholar, synthesising a profession’s experience into his Navigation: A Very Quick Introduction (2017), and publishing his ultimate ebook in 2022, a Catalogue of Surveying and Associated Devices for the Museo Galileo in Florence. He took half in memorable In Our Time discussions about topics together with Renaissance maths (2005), the science of glass (2015) and longitude (2021).
Among the many worldwide neighborhood of instrument students, Jim was a beloved determine, a buddy and mentor to many, and a tireless advocate for world collaboration, together with by means of his presidencies of the Scientific Instrument Fee, the British Society for the Historical past of Science, and the Hakluyt Society. Away from work he was an avid rugby fan, travelling when he might to observe the fortunes of Ulster Rugby and the Irish nationwide workforce, and, nearer to dwelling, London Irish.
A plethora of awards got here to Jim in later life, most notably the Sarton medal of the Historical past of Science Society in 2020, the best honour within the self-discipline. What had as soon as appeared so radical about his work – the declare that science is a hands-on exercise finest understood by means of the research of practitioners and devices – was belatedly being recognised as central to the topic. Jim might get pleasure from being celebrated in retirement as a trailblazer for the varieties of labor that many people now take to be routine. This contains finding out the mundane instruments of science, like these pocket calculators that Johnson so simply dismissed. They continue to be among the many Whipple Museum’s hottest reveals – as Jim knew they’d.
In 2005 he married the globe conservator Sylvia Sumira. She survives him, together with two daughters, Siobhan and Yolaine, from his first marriage, to France Ramette, which led to divorce; 4 grandchildren; and his sister, Ruth.
