History of scienceObituaryJim Bennett obituary
Museum curator with a gift for explaining the history of scientific instruments and the lives of those who made and used themJim Bennett, who has died of cancer aged 76, made significant contributions to the study of past science and to the stewardship of scientific heritage. As director of two history of science museums, one of them in Cambridge and the other in Oxford, he curated 35 exhibitions, authored hundreds of scholarly and popular works, and made several appearances on the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time. Jim was a modest, witty man who helped bring about a quiet revolution in our understanding of past science, replacing a staid history of ideas with a vision of science as a lively and inventive practice.
This vision was not always understood by his less imaginative critics. In 1988, Boris Johnson, then an obscure hack at the Daily Telegraph, attacked Jim for accepting into the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge a large collection of pocket electronic calculators. What next, Johnson asked: egg whisks? Odd socks? Jim’s measured response epitomised his ethos as a curator and historian. The calculators were indeed “worthless in a sense, because no one wants them” – but that was precisely why it “was essential to keep a collection of them”.
Museum artefacts, Jim argued, do not gain their value only from their rarity or their beauty. Especially in the case of scientific objects, it is through the study of their use that we find the most to learn. Jim’s career was dedicated to making this point more widely known.
From 1994, as director of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, Jim was in charge of a more impressive collection than in Cambridge, but one that was then little used by the public. He soon changed that, stewarding a renovation of the site and increasing visitor numbers sevenfold. His exhibitions also grew in ambition and popularity, with more than 70,000 people enjoying one particularly memorable show in the winter of 2009: the world’s first museum display of Steampunk art.
Among fellow curators, Jim is perhaps best remembered for his spectacular 2005 show marking the centenary of the Special Theory of Relativity – a subject seemingly impervious to the methods of gallery display. Jim only had one artefact to work with: a blackboard carrying the scrawled equations of Albert Einstein, retained in Oxford as a kind of relic following the great physicist’s visit there in 1931. Jim brilliantly inverted the focus of the exhibition towards the physical act of communication, inviting an eclectic group of notable people, including Tony Benn, Brian Eno and Cornelia Parker, to chalk on new blackboards exactly matching Einstein’s. The show became as much about fame and classroom nostalgia as any one person’s genius.
The son of Peggy (nee McCune) and Jimmy Bennett, Jim was born in Belfast, where his father worked as a mechanical fitter at the aircraft manufacturer Short & Harland. Jim studied at Grosvenor high school before entering Clare College, Cambridge, taking his BA in natural sciences in 1969 and completing a PhD in the history of science five years later, subsequently published as The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren (1982). Stints teaching in Aberdeen and working as the archivist to the Royal Astronomical Society in London led him to his true vocation as a curator working with scientific artefacts, first at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and then, from 1979 to 1994, as the director of the Whipple Museum.
As a researcher Jim had an abiding interest in the working lives of “practitioners”, men and women of science who made and used tools for getting on in the world. In his exhibitions, he used these lives to make a point that was then still much overlooked: that most of what we now judge to be “science” involved the manipulation of instruments towards practical ends.
He had a gift for explaining clearly how such devices worked and for concocting imaginative displays that brought the public into the worlds where they were used. So visitors to 1900: The New Age (1994), for example, entered via a working replica of HG Wells’s time machine, which transported its passengers back to the bustling centre of the Exposition Universelle world’s fair held in 1900 in Paris, where they could view some of the cutting-edge instruments that were put on public show and then get their photographs taken and their vital measurements recorded in the style of the era’s new science of criminology.
Jim retired from Oxford in 2012, moving to become visiting keeper at the Science Museum from 2013 to 2015, contributing to several major new shows there. He remained a very active scholar, synthesising a career’s expertise into his Navigation: A Very Short Introduction (2017), and publishing his final book in 2022, a Catalogue of Surveying and Related Instruments for the Museo Galileo in Florence. He took part in memorable In Our Time discussions about subjects including Renaissance maths (2005), the science of glass (2015) and longitude (2021).
Among the international community of instrument scholars, Jim was a beloved figure, a friend and mentor to many, and a tireless advocate for global collaboration, including through his presidencies of the Scientific Instrument Commission, the British Society for the History of Science, and the Hakluyt Society. Away from work he was an avid rugby fan, travelling when he could to follow the fortunes of Ulster Rugby and the Irish national team, and, closer to home, London Irish.
A plethora of awards came to Jim in later life, most notably the Sarton medal of the History of Science Society in 2020, the highest honour in the discipline. What had once seemed so radical about his work – the claim that science is a hands-on activity best understood through the study of practitioners and instruments – was belatedly being recognised as central to the subject. Jim could enjoy being celebrated in retirement as a trailblazer for the kinds of work that many of us now take to be routine. This includes studying the mundane tools of science, like those pocket calculators that Johnson so easily dismissed. They remain among the Whipple Museum’s most popular exhibits – as Jim knew they would.
In 2005 he married the globe conservator Sylvia Sumira. She survives him, along with two daughters, Siobhan and Yolaine, from his first marriage, to France Ramette, which ended in divorce; four grandchildren; and his sister, Ruth.
James Arthur Bennett, museum curator and historian of science, born 2 April 1947; died 28 October 2023
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