Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Mystery Object – The ‘Earoscope’

Published by Erika Dicker 10 Comments Tags: , , , .

Earoscope
Earoscope

The curatorial team here at the Museum are the keepers to an immense amount of knowledge, covering a wide variety of special areas. If you have a question, chances are someone here can write you a novel on the subject.

But… I will let you in on a little secret. We don’t know everything about everything!

Which brings me to my mystery object for the week.

The above device was acquired by the Museum in 1987 and is labelled as an ‘Earoscope’, made in 1893. A few of us here have attempted to research it and have come up short. The stamp on it reads “Earoscope, Patent, WASH.AP.4.1893”, which has not helped me in any American, British, or Australian patent databases.

We found just two mentions of it on the web, one here on the CAN network, and another on the CAN network from the Toowoomba Hospital Museum, who are also looking for information on their earoscope:

“Patrick writes… “The patient in the 1930s suffered a traumatic skull fracture and was admitted to our hospital with an ear-full of blood. He went home a week later and was given the earoscope presumably to suck any remaining discharge. I am intrigued about the little patent needle which moves up and down as the handle is turned. How does it all work? The top part is now firmly stuck on ? rusted.”

Which sheds some light, but is this really how it was used?

We cannot open our earoscope to see inside, but as you can see it has a clamp, a handle, and a rubber coated metal tube out the top.

Why would you have to clamp this device onto something?
Can you really use it to suck blood from your ear?
Has anyone ever seen one or used one?
Anyone want to have a guess at what else it was used for? bonus points if you come up with something imaginative and wacky!

UPDATE
Thanks to helpful reader Ben (see comments) we may have a lead on our mystery object! he found this advertisment in ‘The Advertiser’, wednesday 1 March 1911.

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I hope they are talking about the same device! Maybe our earoscope made a sound when the handle was turned?
I’m off to follow up this new lead!

Photography by Geoff Friend © Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.

Meet the curator – Margaret Simpson

Published by Margaret Simpson 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

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Photography by Sotha Bourn © Powerhouse Museum all rights reserved

Name
Margaret Simpson.

What is your specialty area?
The transport collection – I’ve researched everything from a steam car to a tram hearse, luxurious railway carriages to a shearer’s bicycle. More recently I’ve been having fun with the toy collection. It doesn’t really seem like work

How long have you been working at the Museum?
Over 25 years. I began by studying Fine Arts but discovered Historical and Industrial Archaeology on the way then got side tracked to farm machinery then finally transport.

What is your favourite object in the collection?
Having to nominate my favourite object is a bit like considering which is your favourite child. If pressed, I’d say Locomotive No.1. It was built in 1854 and hauled the first train in NSW from Sydney to Parramatta in 1855. I think it’s amazing we’ve had it in the collection since 1884, before planes, cars and even safety bicycles were invented. The engine is displayed in the Museum with a first, second and third class carriage of the day. It amuses me when small children tell their parents that it’s “Thomas”.

If I had to nominate a favourite toy, this 1906 Carette tin toy car would be a contender. It tells so much about early motoring. There’s both a uniformed driver and a footman and the passengers wear protective clothing against the weather.

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
Having been given the opportunity to research and present the Museum’s transport collection in a book has been a highlight. It covers typically Australian transport stories including Cobb & Co coaches, camel saddles, surfboats, indigenous livery designs for Qantas 747s and solar cars. It allowed me to consider and interpret the “big picture” of Australian transport social history rather than concentrate on individual objects.

Mawson’s Antarctic Sledge

Published by Margaret Simpson 7 Comments Tags: , , , .

Mawson's sledge made by L. Hagen & Co., Christiania, Norway, in 1911
Mawson’s sledge made by L. Hagen & Co., Christiania, Norway, in 1911

Several of my most favourite objects at the Powerhouse Museum are the five sledges used on Mawson’s and Scott’s Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century.

Hardly anyone knows we’ve got them. Ever since I saw the old black and white movie Scott of the Antarctic I’ve been fascinated with Antarctic exploration so to get a chance recently to research and document our sledges, which have been in the collection for over 50 years, was fantastic.

The sledge I found the most interesting was this one used on Sir Douglas Mawson’s 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. I found descriptions of the sledges and what they carried in Mawson’s account of the expedition in The Home of the Blizzard which was reprinted in 1996. Our sledge is still fitted with two storage boxes added by the expeditioners while waiting out the winter in Mawson’s famous hut.

Looking at our sledge and reading the book’s description was a bit like a checklist: box for the instruments at rear, check; box for the primus at front, check; tray for kerosene, check; deck of plywood on which to place the load, check; and leather straps for securing the load, check! Further research solved the mystery of the little chocks of wood attached in a semi-circle to the primus box. They held the Nansen cooker in place. Photos of sledges taken by Frank Hurley also provided great in-context images.

Instrument box on the sledge.
Instrument box on the sledge.

The primus box and chocks for the Nansen cooker.
The primus box and chocks for the Nansen cooker.

Photography by Geoff Friend, © Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved

Meet the curator – Anne-Marie Van de Ven

Published by Anne-Marie Van de Ven 2 Comments

Photography by Sarah Rhodes ⓒ Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.
Name
Anne-Marie Van de Ven

What is your specialty area?
Visual communications – graphic design, new media design and commercial photography (or as some like to say – flat rather than fat things!)

How long have you been working at the Museum?
Too long perhaps – over 25 years – ever since I studied education and taught on the Gold Coast and Papua New Guinea, travelled to the States and Europe, and then studied fine arts, philosophy and English literature at the University of Sydney! Mmmm – seems like forever, but it’s mostly been great fun!

What is your favourite object in the collection?
I’m compelled to mention two – the boab wood nut carvings carved by Ngarinyin artist Jack Wherra using a three inch nail and pieces of broken glass in Derby, Western Australia between 1950 and 1960, and the graphic and textile designs of David McDiarmid which are so vibrant and full of a zest for life but with the tragic HIV/AIDS epidemic woven into their very fabric!

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
There are three – a paper I presented in Japan about Australian Aboriginal graphic design (the insight it provided into the disadvantage suffered by Aboriginal Australians, and their resilience, moved the interpreter to tears); an exhibition of contemporary Australian graphic design produced for the 2006 Sydney Design Festival which included 2D graphics as well as designed content for mobile phones; and Celebrating Australia: identity by design Centenary of Federation exhibition which travelled to Washington DC and New York before being seen in Hay, NSW.

Photography by Sarah Rhodes ⓒ Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.

George Gittoes

Published by Anne-Marie Van de Ven 1 Comment Tags: , , .

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Recently I was invited to visit the studio of Australian artist and filmmaker, George Gittoes to inspect his collection of Yellow House Puppet Theatre puppets paintings, ceramics and etchings. Today Gittoes is an internationally renowned filmmaker, but in the Sixties, he was a co-founder of the Yellow House, one of the most colourful contributions to the hippy/psychedelic era in Australia during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This art house opened to the public on April’s Fools Day 1970.

I took this photo of George with one of his puppets during the inspection when George became very animated as he described the puppets one by one. His ‘God / Apollo / Zeus’ puppet is modelled in liquid polystyrene foam (a technique Gittoes mastered while making surf boards) and painted with oils. Gittoes, who loved diving underwater, modelled God to look like the Barrier Reef.

Keep posted for more information about George’s remarkable Yellow House collection of artworks as they enter the Powerhouse Museum collection during the year. As this is my very first curatorial post, I’m looking forward to sharing more of my remarkably diverse curatorial activities as the year progresses.

Photography by Anne-Marie Van de Ven
© Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.

Meet the curator – Paul Donnelly

Published by Paul Donnelly 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography by Sarah Rhodes ⓒ Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.
Photography by Sarah Rhodes ⓒ Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved.

Name
Paul Donnelly

What is your specialty area?
Curators ‘specialities’ seem to grow by the year (!) but my background research is the Bronze-Age archaeology of Jordan and Syria, and I look after numismatics, antiquities, ceramics of Europe and the Mediterranean region (before 1700), and Australian ceramics. At the moment 20th century furniture is also part of my dilettante empire!

How long have you been working at the Museum?
Over twenty years and still loving it!

What is your favourite object in the collection?
I often ponder this and find it hard to prioritise one that is special in a specific area compared to other objects that are special in other areas! I love the Bugatti racer, but then again I really appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty of the Japanese lacquered hair-comb collection, the finery of which contrasts to the historical significance of the Boulton & Watt engine or the rarity of the Hope Chairs . . . . perhaps I’ll add to this daily . . . ?!

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
The 1000 Years of the Olympic Games was an amazing exhibition with which to be involved. It was the premier cultural event of the Sydney Olympic Games and a real coup to have antiquities on loan from Greece. On a personal level it was a great thrill going to Greece and seeing the items – and then when they were here in Australia I could hardly believe that the Museum was host to so many iconic pieces that years before at university had only been pictures in books.

Beugelfauteuil – Gerrit Rietveld

Published by Paul Donnelly 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography by Southa Burns, © Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved
Photography by Sotha Bourn, © Powerhouse Museum. All rights reserved

Today it is hard to imagine that the now-ubiquitous tubular-steel style of furniture was once at the fore-front of modern design. In the mid 1920s tubular steel furniture had developed from purely utilitarian use in hospitals and transport to the domestic environment. Consequently, original examples of pre-WWII modernist furniture are rare – especially with the original receipt as is the case with this example.

This chair (beugelstoel or tube-framed chair) designed in 1927 by the Dutch architect and designer, Gerrit Rietveld, is representative of the very earliest adoption of tubular steel, and unique in its early combination with wood not seen again until the furniture of Ray and Charles Eames after WWII.

The chair is said to have come from a New Zealand household and we would like to know more about its history. Does anyone remember seeing this chair, or a chair like it?

Meet the curator – Erika Dicker

Published by Erika Dicker 11 Comments Tags: , .

Photography by Sarah Rhodes, © all rights reserved
Photography by Sarah Rhodes, © all rights reserved

Name
Erika Dicker

What is your specialty area?
I like to think I’m a ‘jack of all trades’ but I know quite a lot about the history of the Australian merino, early plastics technology, scientific instruments, health and medical devices. I’m currently working on my knowledge of Australian product design for the Australian International Design Awards 2009 exhibition.

How long have you been working at the Museum?
Almost 3 years

What is your favourite object in the collection?

Ediswan Electromassage Machine. This machine has the name ‘Dr. J. Bodkin Adams’ printed on the box. Dr John Bodkin Adams (21 January 1899 – 4 July 1983) was an alleged serial killer who was never convicted for the murder of more than 160 patients between 1946-1956. They died of suspicious circumstances and 132 of them left him money or items in their will.

Electromassage devices, also called violet ray machines, or violet wands, were used by doctors from the 1880s to treat ‘hysteria’ in women. They were used to massage female patients to orgasm as a treatment. General practitioners welcomed the invention as manual massage was fatiguing and slow. Before the invention of electricity, vibrators were run by water and steam. When portable vibrators powered by line electricity became available at the turn of the century they quickly became dominant medical massage technology. But the appearance of vibrators in erotic films in the 1920s eroded the instrument’s social camouflage.

These devices are touted to cure a huge array of medical issues such as constipation, hair loss, acne, and even brain fag!

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
While working on our collection of Australian merino wool, we scientifically tested it and proved some of the great breeding mistakes of the past. I was then able to present the findings at a conference at the National Museum of Australia in 2008.