From the keyboard of Dr Jan

At the weekend I visited the Science Museum in South Kensington, London with my parents.

I think the first time I went there was a school trip when I was about 9 or 10, and I’ve been quite a few times between now and then, but not recently.

It’s fantastic!

It starts off well – there’s one side of the undercarriage from an Airbus A340 in the entrance hall. It’s huge and an impressive piece of engineering. My Dad and I just walked in and said ‘Wow!’.

There’s an Imax cinema in the new Wellcome Wing which seems to show a constant stream of 3D features. The galleries we visited were interesting and fun!

My Dad was keen to see the flight gallery, and in addition to various aircraft suspended from the ceiling there were lots of aircraft engines mounted in racks, each with a plastic tag attached telling you all about it. They had everything from very early radial engines to an enormous diesel behemouth used to power airships. Fascinating.

There is also a section cut from a decommissioned JAL 747 Jumbo, which is very interesting. It’s about 1 or 2 feet thick (along the length of the fuselage) and it’s taken from the front of the plane so it includes the ‘hump’. It’s been repainted in BA colours, which I thought was a bit cheeky

We particularly enjoyed the Secret Life of the Home in the basement, where hi-fi, kitchen appliances, home security and lots of other things were shown. The hi-fi section started with wind up gramophones and moved on to the first ever CD player. There’s an excellent model of a huge spinning CD with a laser shining on it so you can see how it works. The video section has a model of the heads inside a modern VHS machine.

On the ground floor, behind the steam engines and the space gallery is an excellent exhibition of Modern Life. They have one of the original Ampex video recording machines, which uses 2-inch wide tape on huge 10-inch diameter reels. I saw a whole room of descendants of this machine when I visited the CBS facility in New York when I was a child. They still used 2″ tape and were huge floor-standing machines. Everyone was getting excited about the new Sony machines they had which used 1″ tape, were more reliable and gave a higher picture quality.

There’s just so much fab, interesting stuff to see that I’m planning to return real soon now

So, the Science Museum, just go there!