Ven would not have had to write a popular guidebook in which he reverted to history to make
the instruments more accessible to laypeople.
The importance of van der Ven’s guidebook can hardly be overestimated: it provides an
important marker in the history of the Teyler Foundation’s instrument collection, because it
can be taken as the point at which part of the Teyler Museum became a museum of the history
of science.
4. Science Museums and Museums of the History of Science
Van der Ven emphasising the history of the instrument collection in his care will have served
to enhance its reputation as an instrument collection of great historical value which it had
already started acquiring over the previous decades. Recall how two visitors (von Sierstorpff
and Niemeyer) had already remarked upon the collection’s future potential as an illustration
of the history of physics as early as 1806, how van Breda had stipulated that instruments of
historical value should not be disposed of in 1839, and how the Teyler Foundation had been
sought out and asked to contribute some of the historical instruments from its collection to
displays at international exhibitions in the late 1870s and early 1880s.
Perhaps the best illustration of both the fact that, above all, the historical value of the Teyler
Foundation’s scientific instrument collection was widely recognised by the turn of the
century, but also of the fact that Teylers Museum as a whole was increasingly being perceived
as a museum devoted in part to the history of science (and was not just presented as such by
van der Ven), is a keynote speech held in 1905 by the Dutch Nobel Prize laureate Jacobus van
‘t Hoff at the second annual meeting of the trustees of the still-to-be-founded Deutsches
Museum in Munich. The title of his speech was “The Teyler Museum in Haarlem”, and its
subtitle “the significance of historical collections for science and technology”, clearly
demonstrating that the museum was perceived as partially a history museum by outsiders.105
In a further illustration of just how much the term “museum” had come to dominate how the
instrument collection in Haarlem was perceived, van ‘t Hoff started his speech by stating that
“the expression Teyler-Museum does not correspond to the original nature of Teylers’
establishment” 0 , explaining how it was related to the Teyler Foundation, and who Pieter
Teyler van der Hulst had been.
Jacobus H. van ’t Hoff, Das Teyler-Museum in Haarlem und die Bedeutung historischer Sammlungen fîir
Naturwissenschaft und Technik, vol. 9, Deutsches Museum: Vorträge und Berichte (München: Deutsches
Museum, 1912). Van ‘t Hoff had previously published his speech in Dutch: Jacobus H. van ’t Hoff, “Teyler’s
Museum en de beteekenis van geschiedkundige verzamelingen voor natuurwetenschap en industrie,” De Gids 70
(1906): 338-348.
„[...] der Ausdruck Teyler-Museum dem eigentlichen Charakter von Teylers Gründung nicht entspricht“.
Hoff, Das Teyler-Museum in Haarlem und die Bedeutung historischer Sammlungen fü r Naturwissenschaft und
Technik, 9:1.
The context within which this speech was held carries a lot of significance as well. Not only
did the audience consist of many high-profile listeners - including the Prince Regent and
future King Ludwig III of Bavaria - but the establishment of the Deutsches Museum in itself
constitutes a milestone in the history of museums. Its importance lies in the fact that this was
the first large-scale attempt at enhancing scientists’ and engineers’ social status by devoting a
museum to the fruits of their labour and the science underlying them. The idea was that a
museum Sgenerally recognised as a place of high culture and learning - would help fashion
science and engineering as “cultured”, high-brow activities.
Put differently, the designers of the museum in Munich were actively availing themselves of
the social mechanisms that the scientific collections at Teylers had been subjected to more or
less by chance and which had prompted Winkler and van der Ven to write their guidebooks.
Visitors came to a museum with certain expectations. More specifically, they arrived
expecting to find artefacts of “high culture” displayed in an understandable manner. What the
designers of the Deutsches Museum had recognised was that, firstly, they needed to provide
these visitors with a stereotypical museum which would elicit all the behavioural patterns
associated with a museum visit - to use Tony Bennett’s term once again, a place where
visitors would automatically launch into an “exercise in civics”. And that then, once such a
forum had been created, the items selected for display there would, secondly, automatically be
perceived as “high culture”.
In a sense this was similar to what had happened at the Special Loan Exhibition at South
Kensington in 1876 (as was described in the previous chapter). A significant difference
however, was that what was being built in Munich was a permanent museum, not “just” a
temporary international exhibition.
Some caution is called for in that it would not do the prolific and complex driving force
behind the establishment of this new museum, Oskar von Miller, justice to reduce his
brainchild to a mere image campaign in aid of science and engineering. Von Miller had built a
reputation as a first class engineer - he had been largely responsible for installing Bavaria’s
first power grid, for instance H long before he first came forward with ambitious plans to build
a museum in 1903, he was genuinely interested in demonstrating the excitement of
technology to the youth, and his plans for a museum always included plans for an extensive
library that could serve as a reference library and provide inspiration for engineers.107 But at
the same time it is no coincidence that the museum’s full title was Deutsches Museum von
Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik, i.e. “German Museum of Masterpieces of
Science and Technology”. The term “masterpieces” itself already suggests that what was on
display was deemed to be of superior quality.
107 On von Miller see: Wilhelm Füfil, Oskar von Miller 1855-1934: Eine Biographie (München: C.H. Beck,
2005). Interestingly, von Miller visited the Paris Electrical Exhibition in 1881 - recall that the Cuthbertson
Electrostatic Generator from Teylers Museum was on display there - and this visit proved to be “turning point”
in his life: Ibid., 46-47.