Past exhibitions and displays

We've been creating virtual versions of our exhibitions since 1995—take a look:

Lines of Faith: design featuring detail of an astrolabe

Lines of Faith: Instruments and Religious Practice in Islam

This Student Exhibition displays Islamic scientific instruments from this museum. These instruments are inscribed with many elaborate engravings, which show that they not only had a scientific role - they also played an integral role in religious practice.

10 March – 27 June 1998

The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple

The stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel, and the Temple of Solomon are among the best known in the Old Testament, often used during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to frame accounts of the progress of knowledge. The works represented provide a view of the activities of a loose circle of authors, projectors, and thinkers which formed in England around the émigré German activist, Samuel Hartlib.

2 February – 2 May 1998

From Cameras exhibition: a lantern slide of an outing of the Oxford Photographic Society, 1890

Cameras: the Technology of Photographic Imaging

Featuring a small but fine collection of cameras, early photographic lenses and accessories, and darkroom equipment covering a wide spectrum of photographic history, from a lens of 1839 of the type used by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre to an example of a 1960s Russian 'FED 4' camera and beyond.

20 May – 13 September 1997

George Graham and Bill Gates: A Study in Architectural Dominance

A Virtual Exhibition by Jonathan Sills compares George Graham, an English mechanic and the first instrument maker to specialize in these large measuring instruments needed by observatories, with Bill Gates and his Microsoft corporation.

1997

an imagined scene in the life of the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)

The Noble Dane: Images of Tycho Brahe

The Museum has a fine oil painting in its collections of an imagined scene in the life of the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). It was painted in 1855 by Eduard Ender and shows Tycho demonstrating a celestial globe to the Emperor Rudolph II in Prague. This special exhibition follows its restoration and is centred on this scene.

21 January – 26 March 1997

The Geometry of War, 1500-1750

The mathematicians of the Renaissance applied their geometry to all manner of practical disciplines - from navigation and surveying to cartography and perspective. This exhibition presents the application of mathematical science in the context of the battlefield in three areas - Gunnery, Rangefinding and Surveying, and Fortification. Troop Formations and the Telescope are also covered.

20 February – 30 November 1996

detail from The Measurers, a painting depicting a range of practical activities

The Measurers: a Flemish Image of Mathematics in the Sixteenth Century

This special exhibition was centered around a very unusual and important painting in the Museum's collection, known simply as 'The Measurers', which depicts a range of practical activities, foremost among them mathematical instrument making, used to start a discussion of the practical mathematics movement of Renaissance Europe and as a means of organizing the display of a large number of related objects.

3 July – 15 December 1995

Early Photographs

This small exhibition, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection, presents some examples of the earliest types of photographic image. It concentrates only on the first three processes to be developed: Daguerreotypes, Photogenic Drawings and Calotypes.

1995

Oxford Virtual Science Walk composite picture with map and sketches

The Oxford Virtual Science Walk

The Oxford Science Walk takes you to some of the most important and interesting historic scientific sites in Oxford, from the time of the founding of the University in the 13th century and the work of Friar Bacon to advancements in modern science such as the development of penicillin.