Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Enamel signs, electric light and cloisonné

Published by Debbie Rudder 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Powerhouse Museum has an exceedingly eclectic collection, but what objects bring these three themes together?

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The first is a rather large maker’s plate that was souvenired from a crane in the derelict Ultimo Power House before the site became the museum. The couple who abducted this sign eventually handed it to me to be acquired. In the process, I discovered how the sign was made by a Sydney foundry: a slurry of powdered glass, white oxide pigment and clay was baked onto a very clean metal surface; this fused the ingredients to create highly durable enamel; and then a second layer, with blue pigment in place of white and with the letters masked so they stayed white, was baked on.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The second is an advertising sign made by the Patent Enamel Company in England. It includes a detailed illustration of SS Burrumbeet; this would have been applied as a gummed decal that was then covered with clear enamel. Showing the ship steaming through fog stressed its advantage over most of its contemporaries: electric lights, which shine through the portholes and from the deck and mast. This feature is further stressed via the pictorial devices on either side of the main image.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The cloisonné display consists of materials, tools and nine stages in the making of a tiny vase.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The enamelling process involves using wire to separate the surface into compartments (cloisons in French), applying appropriately coloured enamel paste to each compartment, and firing the vase. This display can be seen at the Powerhouse Discovery Centre, along with a wonderful eclectic mix of objects – including several enamel signs hanging on the walls.

Beginning Electronic Music- Tristram Cary part 1

Published by Stephen Jones 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The purpose of this extended note on Tristram Cary is to provide a context within which to introduce several electronic music instruments within the collection of the Powerhouse Museum. These will include two pre-synthesiser devices, early EMS synthesisers and other custom built objects that are now part of the museum’s collection.

Tristram Cary, an Adelaide based electronic and computer music composer, was a son of the author Joyce Cary, grew up in a musical family and learned to play the piano from the age of five. He entered University (Oxford) in 1943 to study Classics but kept up his interest in music. This was during the Second World War, so on turning eighteen that year he volunteered for the Royal Navy. Having had teenage experience in building radios and other bits and pieces, he gained a post as a wireless mechanic and studied electronics. He was appointed a Radar Officer in 1944, installing and calibrating radar sets on board ship.

During this period he continued his interest in music and began to teach himself musical theory and composition. He heard of the development of tape recording while in the Navy and he realised that he could edit and make musical works by cutting up the tape with a razor blade and re-splicing it. As he later said:

It occurred to me that … here was a chance to have a new sort of music altogether. The editing capacity meant that you could cut sounds together that were not normally together.[1]

He was de-mobilised from the Royal Navy in late 1946 and by then, effectively, a qualified electronics engineer he turned these skills acquired as a radar operator to making musical devices. He recognised that he

could use [his] skills to make [his] own studio, and design [his] own gear, and so for very little money there was a mass of surplus stuff. There was the junk of three armies: the American, the German and the British Army, was in the London junk shops and you could go around, pick up gear cheap, sometimes absolutely brand new still in the original case. Probably designed for another purpose, but if you knew what you were doing, you could make it do something different.[2]

At the end of his time in the Navy he finished his degree at Oxford and then enrolled to study music at Trinity College, London. His background in electronics meant that he understood the theory that any sound could be constructed through the summation of a suitable ensemble of sine waves. With the end of the war tape recorders began to become available in the UK but were the sort of things that only the BBC could afford so Cary used his skills to try to build a recording device disc from a turntable and record cutting head, which used a weight to turn the disc at a constant speed, but it didn’t work very well.[3]

His original attempt to build a disc cutter led him to later purchase a 78rpm disc lathe, with which he began making his own version of musique concrète, recording sounds he wanted to use, manipulating them through amplification and cutting them into his instrumental recordings, only discovering the French work of Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues later.[4]

Cary in his Earl's Court living room/studio. The tape recorder he is resting his left hand on (a TR51) can still be seen in the Fressingfield studio, the gear to the right of the picture is another tape recorder (the Bradmatic) and to the right (half cut off) is the disc-cutting lathe. The picture on the wall behind Cary is by William Thompson, a friend of Cary’s.

In the period of the 1950s electronic music had little presence but there were a few people who were doing things that made it possible to begin to think about it.
Schaeffer, in France, had been using tape recorders to capture sounds from the urban environment to cut and splice into complex musical adventures that brought industrial sound to the radio and the concert hall. The radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), in Cologne, Germany, had assembled an electronic music studio using surplus radio test equipment. Their view was implacably opposed to the French process of manipulating sampled sounds. For the Germans the idea was to produce sound purely electronically using only summations of sine waves. The master of this process was Stockhausen but even he relented by the 1960s when he produced Gesang der Junglinge.

Cary began to experiment with electronic sound in 1947, building variable-resistance tuned oscillators similar to those he used in the Navy and a keyboard with electrical contacts from an old Harmonium.[5] He was mainly writing instrumental music at this point and didn’t produce fully electronic music until well after he moved to Nevern Rd, Earl’s Court (in London) in 1951, where he built a new studio based on disc-cutting machines. The Bradmatic tape recorder became available in 1952 and Cary bought one with which he began composing electro-acoustic and orchestral music for radio and film. His first properly electronic work was for the radio play The Japanese Fishermen (1955), which required special sounds to represent the sea, the fishermen rowing and the mystery of their illnesses, the result of radiation from American nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific.[6]

His first great success was the instrumental music score for the film The Ladykillers (1955) starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers. However his primary source for sound was the recording of everyday domestic sounds manipulated with the disc cutters and tape recorder. He continued to write music for radio, film and television producing the sound for Richard Williams’ The Little Island which won the best experimental film at the 1958 Venice Film Festival [7], and the radio piece The Ballad of Peckham Rye (based on the novel by Muriel Spark and directed by Christopher Holme) for which he won the Premio Italia prize at the Concorso Internazionale Per Opere Radiofoniche E Televisive, Verona 1962.

All of these works consisted in a mixture of instrumental sounds, musique concrète and electronically generated sounds.

“]
Premio Italia prize for Cary’s music for the Ballade of Peckham Rye (1962). Collection: Powerhouse Museum [2009/83/18

 

 

[1] David Ellis, “Music pioneer celebrates milestone”, Lumen, The University of Adelaide Magazine, winter, 2005, http://www.adelaide.edu.au/lumen/issues/5381/news5593.html

[2] Cary quoted in Andrew Ford, “Interview with Tristram Cary,” for the ABC Music Show. Transcript available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2006/17/18642.htm

[3] Kaye R. Fitton, Tristram Cary: Pioneer of Electronic Music in England, Masters of Music Thesis, Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 1983 (University of Adelaide Library – AV 09MU.M, F547 c.2/1-3).

[4] Andrew Ford, “Interview with Tristram Cary,” for the ABC Music Show.

[5] Fitton, Tristram Cary: Pioneer of Electronic Music in England. In the Ford interview he says 1949, but the Fitton thesis has a cartoon drawn by a friend of his, showing the keyboard and other bits of valve electronics, which is dated 1947.

[6] The Japanese Fishermen (BBC Radio, 1955, prod: Terence Tiller) on the CD Soundings.[Tall Poppies, TP139]

Setting a Martian Endurance Record

Published by Kerrie Dougherty 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

On May 20, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity set a new endurance record for operating on the surface of Mars, surpassing the record of six years and 116 days set by NASA’s Viking 1 lander almost 30 years ago.

Artist's image of Mars Exploration Rover. Image courtesy of NASA.

Opportunity landed in Mars’ northern hemisphere on Mars on January 25, 2004 for a mission that was originally planned to last 90 sols (Martian days; approximately 92 and a half Earth days) and cover less than a kilometre. Not only has Opportunity far outlived its ‘design lifetime’ it has already travelled more than 20 km across the Martian surface and still has about another 12 km to go to reach its long term destination, Endeavour Crater.

NASA image showing Opportunity's path across the Martian surface leading up to May 20. Image courtesy of NASA.

Opportunity’s twin rover, Spirit, actually landed on Mars three weeks before Opportunity: but due to the low amount of sunlight reaching its solar panels in Mars’ southern hemisphere winter, Spirit has been out of communication since March 22, and it is uncertain if the rover will survive the winter. If Spirit does resume communication when spring arrives, then it will actually become the holder of the Martian surface longevity record.

The previous record holder, Viking 1, landed on Mars on July 20, 1976. It was part of the Viking program, which consisted of two orbiters, each of which carried a stationary lander. Viking 2 arrived on the Martian surface on September 4, 1976 (Australian time). Viking 1 operated until November 13, 1982, more than two years longer than Viking 2 or either of the Viking orbiters.

A full-size model of the 'Viking 1' lander. Image courtesy of NASA.

The overall record for longest working lifetime of any spacecraft at Mars currently belongs to NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, which arrived in orbit around Mars in 1997 and operated for more than 9 years. However, MGS’s record will soon be broken by another NASA orbiter, Mars Odyssey, which has been in orbit since 2001.

Meet the Curator: Andrew Grant

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Photography by Sotha Bourn © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved

Name
Andrew Grant

What is your specialty area?
Land Transport with particular interest in horse drawn transport. It’s hard to claim any field within the vast transport area as a “specialty”, because they are all complex. My interest in transport began with cars and trains in my boyhood, but it was not until many years later while studying Industrial Arts that I chose to write my honours thesis about the Australian motor car industry. While teaching high school I took up a Masters Degree, also in Industrial Arts, to examine the links between the motor car industry and the coach building industry that had preceded it. This led to my discovering that very little research had been done into the latter industry which resulted in horse drawn vehicles becoming a focus. The demands of teaching and a young family were a challenge to the study, so the opportunity to join the Museum in 1980 as an assistant curator of transport was timely and exciting. At that time, the Curator of Transport and Engineering, Norman Harwood, was in his last of 30 years’ service at the Museum, and I was very fortunate to spend my first 6 months at the Museum effectively being mentored before his retirement. “Norm” had a very engaging personality and was a true hands-on professional curator whose foresight, wisdom and experience provided much of the solid foundation on which the new Museum would be built. Norm introduced me to the Museum’s impressive and previously unknown collection of horse drawn vehicles, some of which have since been featured in Powerhouse Museum exhibitions and, more recently, Powerhouse Discovery Centre displays.

How long have you been working at the Museum?
30 years (the time has flown by!)

Favourite object in the collection?
The horse drawn omnibus. This is a special favourite not only because it is a horse drawn vehicle but because it has a particular charm. This is due to its distinctive design, utilitarian yet pleasing to the eye, and the fascinating anecdotes that show how these distinctive vehicles were woven into the daily lives of the residents of late 19th century Sydney.

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
While it is not a discrete project, I’m proud to have had the wonderful and unique experience of planning and executing exhibitions for both Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the Powerhouse Museum. I had the unique opportunity of being involved in all the planning meetings for the first stage of the Power House Museum (as it was then called), followed by the great practical experience of liaising with architects and designers, researching objects, writing labels and installing the exhibits. A few years later, I was part of a large team who worked on the groundbreaking development of the Powerhouse Stage 2, as it was called, then by far the largest Museum project ever in Australia.

The Trolley man immortalised

Published by Charles Pickett 20 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Photography by Raymond de Berquelle. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

Do you remember Joseph Cindric? Probably not, unless I tell you that Joseph (or Josef or Joso or Joe) Cindric was the man who for decades pushed a hand-made trolley around the Sydney CBD. From the 1960s to the 1980s he was as much a part of the city scene as the Town Hall or Hyde Park where he often rambled or slept during the day.

Until Cindric’s death, almost no one knew his name. Even Richard Goodwin, the artist whose sculptural career was part inspired by the trolley man, who filmed and photographed him for years, did not know until one day in 1994 when a nursing home rang him with the news of Cindric’s passing. ‘Who is Joseph Cindric?’ Goodwin replied, before agreeing to be one of the few mourners at Cindric’s funeral.

Image courtesy Richard Goodwin. © all rights resevered

The Powerhouse curatorial department had a similar experience when staff of the Bennelong Nursing Home, Ashfield, rang to enquire if we were interested in acquiring Cindric’s trolley, resting unused in their garage. They could have discarded it, but fortunately were aware of its place in Sydney’s memories and imagination.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The trolley has been in the PHM collection since then, but like most of our best treasures has barely been seen in public. However my interest was rekindled by Christopher Snelling’s plan for a Castle Hill open day using this year’s History Week theme ‘Faces of the street’.

According to immigration records held by the National Archives, Josef Cindric was born in June 1906, and left Bremerhaven, Germany on the Charlton Sovereign in 1948, arriving in Sydney on 29 October that year. His nationality was given as Yugoslavia, and he was classified as a ‘displaced person’ or refugee. He was a qualified ships’ engineer, but by the 1960s had begun his life on the streets. For much of the time on the streets he received the aged pension. Like most homeless people he slept mainly during the day because it was safer; he wore construction helmets after being mugged.

According to Father James Ware of St Patrick’s Church, who officiated at Cindric’s funeral and was one of the few people to converse at length with him, the trolley man had been a member of the Hitler Youth (or perhaps the Ustashe equivalent in Croatia) and his vagrancy was partly a response to the defeat of his political faith. [Eureka Street, Vol.4, n.10, 1994, p.23] This story sits oddly with the fact that Cindric was already aged 27 when Hitler came to power. More credible is the tale that Cindric was haunted by the loss of contact with his son after the War. Generally, Cindric was uncommunicative to the journalists and others who tried to learn his story; he made appointments to talk to a few, but these dates were not kept.

However Cindric’s anonymity was part of his mystique. A silent, persistent presence, he became almost a public sculpture or performance artist, with the difference that observers were free to create their own allegories and meanings for him. Richard Goodwin was one of those fascinated by Cindric:

‘He was like a centaur – a sort of man-machine. The two were indivisible. I became interested in his presence and attachment to a machine….He was and remains seminal to my work’.

[Richard Goodwin: Performance to porosity, Paul McGillick, editor, Craftsman House, 2006, p.210.]

Goodwin began creating ‘exoskeleletons’; some were prosthetic extensions to the human body inspired by Cindric’s trolley, others were exploded frameworks or mechanisms. The exoskeleton concept became central to Goodwin’s work. In 1978 Goodwin secured funding from the Australian Film Commission to film Cindric on his rambles; the result, ‘The Inhabitant’ appeared in 1980. In 1979 he produced a sculptural replica of the trolley. Purchased by the arts impresario Kym Bonython, this work was destroyed with Bonython’s home during the Adelaide Hills bushfires in 1983.

After Cindric’s death, Goodwin produced another homage/replica of the trolley. Around this time he also produced a shop sign of Cindric for the trendy retailer Remo Guiffre; the Powerhouse acquired this sign and a sketch in 1995. We are now hoping to acquire Richard Goodwin’s trolley sculpture as well.

Image courtesy Richard Goodwin. © all rights reserved

This work is based on Cindric’ trolley during the mid-1970s, when the vehicle was an impressive structure, rolling on motorcycle wheels and tyres. However the trolley was always a work in progress and shrank in size during the 1980s as Cindric’s health declined. Its main contents were tools and various scavenged and donated parts, collected to keep the trolley repaired and rolling.

In keeping with his exoskeleton theory, Goodwin presents the trolley stripped of its load of bags and boxes, emphasising its combination of skeletal structure and vehicular presence. The sculpture highlights Cindric’s ingenuity, rendering the trolley as a creation rather than a necessity. The silk flowers were collected at Rookwood following Cindric’s funeral.

The acquisition of Cindric’s trolley in 1995 was opposed by several curators on the grounds that it was ‘ugly’ and ‘dirty’; while the trolley’s homeless provenance provoked claims of social inappropriateness or insensitivity.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Cindric’s unconscious role as muse of one of Australia’s most celebrated sculptors was not recognised, although the acquisition hardly needed this justification; Cindric’s presence made its mark on artist and non-artist. He invited people to question their life and its relationship to those lacking the comforts of home and loved ones. Like Arthur Stace aka Mr Eternity, Cindric confirmed that statements could be made and questions posed in many ways. Goodwin’s sculpture is a powerful tribute to a man who wanted to be unknown and invisible, yet became one of Sydney’s most recognisable people.

Do you remember the trolley man?

(Editors note: part two of this post can be found here)

Meet a Regional Services Intern- Michelle Maddison

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Photography by Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

As pointed out in our earlier post, internships form a significant part of the Museum’s Regional Services program and in this post, we have invited Michelle Maddison, a Curator from the Museum of the Riverina in Wagga Wagga, to talk about her experience.

I was immensely pleased by my stay at the Powerhouse – it met my expectations and I came away with useful knowledge gained both through research and the opportunity to meet face-to-face with specialists.

The Museum of the Riverina has a small but important costume collection. Uncovering the secrets of the collection has been an exciting journey and was the focus of my internship at the Powerhouse in 2009. As part of my internship, I researched a number of garments so they could be entered on the Australian Dress Register.

This research included looking at a tap dancing costume – a tutu-style dress of black tulle decorated with metallic braid and sequins. The dress belonged to Tivoli dancer Pauline Harvey and we thought it had been worn at the Wagga Wagga Eisteddford, in the closing years of World War II. It wasn’t until we put the dress on a mannequin that I realised it was a child’s dress and that Pauline must have worn it just after she began dancing at the age of 5.

At the Museum of the Riverina we have adapted what we have learnt from the Australian Dress Register for practical use. Following an initial workshop with Powerhouse staff, I developed a history of textiles exhibition called Dress for the Occasion. Tips I picked up allowed us to date garments to a more specific time period.

Having had the opportunity to look at the Australian Dress Register and what people are entering onto it, I feel, as someone who works in a regional museum, that it fosters an important sense of community that is especially important in regional museums which can feel isolated from what goes on in the metropolitan areas.

To find out more about the internship program, click here.

Mystery object- archaeology

Published by Melanie Pitkin 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

It’s only fitting that during National Archaeology Week we should have, as our mystery object, an actual archaeological find. This artefact is made of kaolin and it measures 36mm length x 20mm width. A small hole runs all the way through it. It has only just been acquired into the Museum’s collection and it will be on display at the Signal Station (Sydney Observatory) over the weekend of 29-30th May.

*Hint* It will help if you read my earlier post here. Also, the orientation of the artefact in this particular image is not necessarily the orientation when it is used.

Is it part of a…?

a) stove lighter
b) smoking pipe
c) oil lamp
d) gunpowder storage case
e) tool for shaping gunflints

All will be revealed next week!

Conservator’s Corner- Preserving the Cyril Ruwald Collection

Published by Erika Taylor 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Drawing by Cyril Ruwald. Collection; Powerhouse Museum

We have received funding for a project called TAM (Total Asset Management). The project focuses on our collection, rather than on exhibitions. The objective is to preserve, document and manage the collection so that it can be made more widely accessible.

One component of the project that is nearing completion is the rehousing of the Cyril Ruwald Collection. It consists of 1424 architectural plans and drawings including diazo prints, pencil and ink drawings, blueprints, negative photo-prints and monochrome photographs.

Cyril Christian Ruwald (1895-1959), was one of several architects who designed hotels for Tooth & Co during the 1930s and 1940s. He was instrumental in adapting the streamlined horizontal look of European modernism to hotel design. The collection is regularly viewed for research.

The project involved the following steps:

 

Photography by Chris Brothers © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

Step 1: Rehousing – the collection, donated to the PHM in 1990, was originally housed in four large storage boxes, with 350 items per box. It was in poor condition, overall, primarily due to poor storage.

005537043.jpg

Photography Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

Step 2: Photography – digital conservation photography of the Ruwald collection has now provided greater access to conservators, staff and clients. Conservation photography clearly documents all aspects of an object so that conservation staff can accurately report its condition. With items from this collection, photographs are taken of the front and back of each, and prints are made of those requiring conservation and condition reports, as well as after-conservation shots.

Cyril Ruwald. Collection; Powerhouse Museum

The images were shot with a Canon 30D, EF 28-135mm lens and Elinchrom soft box studio lights. Studio lights are set at 45 degrees and equidistant from the subject, to provide flat and even illumination. Digital RAW originals of each of the images are kept – then using Photoshop CS3, they are resized to jpgs and the object identification number is added to each image, for uploading to our Collection Database K-EMu.

Step 3: Preservation – the individual requirements of each item were assessed and more fragile items, including blueprints and drawings on tracing paper etc., are interleaved with archive text, placed in Mylar sleeves or supported with archival backing boards as required.

A condition report is written for each item and the photographs are annotated to indicate areas of damage and deterioration. Drawings treated, so far, have had large tears, missing pieces, been stuck together, and tackiness and staining from adhesive tape. The drawings on tracing paper have been the most fragile and damaged.

They were carefully separated from each other and from any interleaving tissue between them. Tape, staining and tackiness, and fragments of paper from other drawings, were removed by swabbing with a cotton bud with petroleum spirits and lifting off with a scalpel. Fragments of paper were matched with holes and gaps in the drawings. Creases and folds were removed one by one by swabbing with a cotton bud dampened with di-ionised water, burnishing with a bone folder over a piece of Mylar, and pressing under weights.

Tears were repaired and missing pieces of paper re-attached. Tracing paper is a difficult material to work with because it cockles when it is wet, so two methods of sticking the paper together have been tested – dryish starch paste and Japanese tissue, or small strips of heat set tissue. The first method seems the best – it is stronger, despite the threat of cockling, and the heatset tissue does not stick as well to the tracing paper, so the first method will be used for future repairs on this collection.

 

Photography by Powerhouse Museum © all rights reserved

The Ruwald collection has now been relocated to a new 23 drawer storage cabinet designed specifically for the flat storage of plans and drawings. The cabinet, made of zinc coated steel finished with a high quality powder coating, has perforated drawers allowing for ventilation of the works.

It is hoped that with the photographs available online, there will be less need to access the original drawings, reducing wear and tear on the original objects.

Following the family tradition, Cyril Ruwald’s grand daughter, Monica Earl, a Sydney Uni architecture student, recently won the Australian Institute of Architects NSW Design Medal for her redesign of Belmore Park.

Making light work: 50 years of the Laser

Published by Kerrie Dougherty 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography by Matthias Zepper, source: Wikimedia Commons

Fifty years ago, on May 16, the first functioning laser was switched on at the Hughes Research Laboratories in California. Constructed by engineer and physicist Theodore
Maiman, this first Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation device used a pink synthetic ruby rod to generate its powerful beam of light. Einstein proposed the idea of stimulated emission (in which a photon, or light particle, causes an excited atom to emit an identical photon) in 1917, but it was not until 1953 that American physicist Charles Townes was able to create the first ‘stimulated emission’ device, the “maser” – Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation – in which microwaves were used as the atom-exciter. Townes and others then conceived of the idea of using visible light instead of microwaves and Maiman became the first to make the concept work.

However, other research teams were also working on the development of lasers and only a few months after Maiman’s first laser, a helium neon laser was in operation at the rival Bell Laboratories. By 1962 the gallium arsenide diode laser had been developed, which was the direct precursor of the small commercial laser devices widely used today.

Laser-based technologies have helped transform the world over the past fifty years, often in ways that are not readily apparent. Lasers can be found in supermarket bar-code scanners and hospital operating rooms; in DVD and CD players and the adaptive optics of telescopes; they create holograms and light shows and are widely used in industry for precision cutting and welding; lasers guide weapons to their targets and measure the exact distance to the Moon. Perhaps most important of all in today’s world, lasers make the internet possible, by carrying immense quantities of data along the fibre optic cables that network the globe.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

An interesting laser-based device in the museum’s collection is this laser cielometer, an instrument used by meteorological and airport authorities worldwide to accurately determine the height of the cloud base (the lowest altitude of the visible part of a cloud mass). Cloud base is an important meteorological variable for aviation safety, as it determines whether pilots can use Visual Flight Rules or must follow Instrument Flight Rules for take-off and landing. A laser ceilometer determines the height of the base of the clouds by measuring the time required for a pulse of light to be scattered back from the cloud base.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The first laser ceilometer was developed in the mid 1960s and the instrument has become widely used in automated weather stations and at airports. The ceilometer in our collection was manufactured in the United States by Qualimetrics Inc. and installed at Armidale (NSW) airport where it operated between 1992-2000, before being replaced by a more advanced model. It was designed for permanent outdoor operation with its electronics hermetically sealed and protected from moisture by a replaceable desiccant cartridge.

Excavating at Sydney Observatory

Published by Melanie Pitkin 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Image courtesy of Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd

May 16-22 marks National Archaeology Week. To recognise this, we have developed a small display of archaeological finds at the Powerhouse Museum (on show now – late July) and another display in the Signal Station on site at Sydney Observatory (May 29-30).

The finds come from the 2008 excavations conducted by the New South Wales Government Architect’s Office and Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd in the grounds of the Signal Station adjacent to Sydney Observatory. Specifically, they were excavating Fort Phillip, a strategic stronghold built in 1804-06 (but never finished). The Fort was built in the most commanding position overlooking Sydney Cove and served as a defence against the potential threat of rebellion by convicts. It was partially demolished in the 1850s to make way for Sydney Observatory.

Image courtesy of Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd

Some highlights from the excavations include the discovery of a bomb-proof chamber used in storage and retreat (which also revealed evidence of grapeshot and European gunflint, the latter of which is rare to find in Australia), two anchor points for the original flagstaff and artefacts related to the domestic occupation of both the Fort and the inhabitants of the Signal Station (built in the late 1840s and occupied right up until the 1990s).

Image courtesy of Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd

Excavations at the site intermittently continue and new finds were being made as recently as April 2010 – including the discovery of what appears to be lead shot used as ammunition in flintlock pistols.

Image courtesy of Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd

Dawn Rose, from the Sydney Observatory, put together a video snapshot in mid-April documenting some of the story (see below).

You can find out more about the excavations on the Sydney Observatory blog and, of course, by visiting our displays! See here.