Hidden treasures and stories from our collection
Traffic congestion in a big city like Sydney is never far from the headlines and for those of us who need to cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge it is a daily reality. But traffic congestion in cities is nothing new. In London in the 1630s the clogging of narrow city streets by the increased use of horse-drawn vehicles was causing considerable outrage amongst the populace.
Continue reading ‘Solving Traffic Congestion in 1634′
Drinking cup, used by James Calvert. on Leichhardt’s expedition from Brisbane to Port Essington,1844 -1845, Powerhouse Museum, NN10265
It may be hard to imagine now, but once this cup must have been one of the most important things in the life of James Snowden Calvert. Around 165 years ago this cup travelled with Calvert and Leichhardt on the first overland trip from Brisbane on the east coast of Australia to Port Essendon on the west coast. On this trip across the dry and dusty interior water was often in short supply and the ration handed out to Calvert in this cup must have been one of the highlights of each day. Perhaps this was the reason he kept the cup as a memento of the hardships they shared on this, the first of Leichhardt’s expeditions.
Continue reading ‘An Australian relic from Leichhardt’s exploration of the interior’
2007/30/1-29/21 Christmas card, Phoebe, Wilfrid and Charlotte Rolfe to Dahl and Geoffrey Collings and family, paper/ink, Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, Killcare Heights, New South Wales, Australia, 1946
Saturday 31st March, 8:30-9:30 is Earth hour and it gives us a chance to turn off the lights and do things we may not normally do. More than 2 million individuals and 2,000 businesses in Sydney took part in the First Earth hour in 2007. Earth Hour has grown to millions of people in over 5000 cities across 135 countries.
Continue reading ‘Things to do in the dark, ideas for Earth Hour’
This post is part of an ongoing series of energy storage posts by intern Brett Szmajda.
Walking into the Castle Hill stores of the Powerhouse Museum is like walking into the prop warehouse of a Hollywood movie studio. You enter through a nondescript door in a modest, unassuming looking set of buildings, and when you turn around you encounter a cornucopia of steam engines, Mardi Gras floats, flywheels the size of a Mini Cooper, and exotic old X-ray machines that could be used for set dressing in a Frankenstein remake. The air is crisp and clean from the climate control system; the objects are neatly ordered and tagged, on stacks as high as a giraffe. We round a corner, and we come across an object that looks as if a drawer full of hanging files got intimate with the plumbing section at Bunnings.
“Take a look at this.” says Debbie.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s one of the most promising battery technologies of the last 20 years,” she begins.
The vanadium flow battery.
The vanadium flow battery is a brilliant archetype of the trials and triumphs that accompany research and development. Throughout the development, led by Professor Maria Skyllas-Kazacos at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, research momentum was maintained by the phenomenal theoretical promise of the battery. Imagine a fully electric car that you could ‘recharge’ in a matter of minutes. Imagine a battery that would let small businesses and power companies store cheap energy generated at night, and use that power during the day, when energy is expensive.
A typical rechargeable battery contains two electrodes of differing material, immersed in a liquid electrolyte; chemical reactions occur between the differing metals of the electrodes, mediated by the electrolyte. But in a flow battery, like the vanadium battery, the principal chemical reactions instead occur between two liquid electrolytes. These electrolytes are pumped past one another (hence the name flow battery) in separate chambers that are separated by a thin membrane. As the two electrolytes flow past one another, they exchange ions (charged molecules) across the membrane, and this generates current.
Close-up of the exterior of the vanadium battery cells, where the electrolytes interact with each other.
To understand the difficulty in designing a flow battery, consider how your lungs extract oxygen from the air, and remove waste carbon dioxide from your body. Inhaling causes thin-walled sacs in your lungs (called alveoli) to inflate. Alveoli are surrounded by clusters of blood vessels; oxygen diffuses across the thin alveolar membrane, into the blood. Simultaneously, carbon dioxide diffuses from your blood into your lungs, to be exhaled. It’s critically important that the blood and air are kept in separate compartments (failure to do so would of course be fatal), and only selected molecules — oxygen and carbon dioxide — are allowed to pass through. Analogously, the challenge of designing a flow battery is making a membrane that will allow current to flow between the different electrolytes, but that doesn’t let the two electrolytes mix. The vanadium battery wasn’t the first flow battery, but it was the first to use the same metal in both electrolyte solutions, thus neatly eliminating the problem of electrolytes mixing across the membrane.
Golfcart powered by vanadium battery, used as a prototype during battery development.
The unique strengths of the vanadium battery are a short recharge time and the ability to store charge efficiently for long periods. The vanadium battery can be quickly recharged at high voltages; or — perhaps most attractively — it can be instantly recharged by replacing the electrolyte with fresh, charged electrolyte. Second, by pumping the electrolytes out of the ‘cells’ (where the reactions take place) and into storage vats, the vanadium battery can sit for many hours, with no self-discharge. These two attributes suggested potential commercial applications. For the consumer, there could be electric cars that you refilled with vanadium ‘fuel’ instead of gasoline; and for the business customer, the vanadium battery could be used as energy storage for the electric grid, allowing arbitrage (charge batteries when electricity is cheap, use battery power when electricity is expensive) and providing stability during intermittent drops in power supply.
Vanadium batteries have found a home providing energy storage for power stations, with several stations world-wide trialling the technology. Unfortunately, the harsh light of reality intruded on the dream of vanadium-fuelled cars — vanadium batteries are expensive to manufacture, have problems operating at low temperatures, and no battery to date has an energy density (that is, power per unit weight) that can compete with the fantastic energy density of petrol. But research continues: scientists have recently boasted numerous improvements to the energy density and temperature tolerance of vanadium batteries. Don’t give up on the dreams of the vanadium car.
Recently we were doing the final proofs for a new book about the issues of long term preservation of digital information. I came across a discrepancy in two separate entries on the same object that introduced its own issue about information preservation.
The book, Digital Dark Age: a cautionary tale, is a collaboration between the Parramatta Heritage Centre and the Powerhouse Museum and draws on the graphic art work of Matt Huynh. It looks at the issues associated with the storing of personal and society’s information records using technology that is likely to be obsolete in a few short years.
One of the Museum’s objects that feature in the story is a Sumerian clay tablet which is a record of a financial transaction that took place 4000 years ago.
Sumerian clay tablet, receipt for livestock, 2041 BCE, 85/452
The tablet is mentioned in the body of the text and in a glossary of objects. A translation of the cuneiform script on the tablet in the body text referred to a receipt for ‘..five sheep, one lamb and four grass-fed male kids..’. Later in the object glossary the caption referred to ‘receipt issued- Total: five grass-fed sheep, Total: one lamb. Total: four male kids’.
I drew a red ring around both entries and made a note to find out whether the sheep or the kids had been grass-fed and wondered if it was me who was the duffer who had incorrectly transcribed the information from the acquisition record or whether I could blame someone else.
I went to the Collection’s database record and found that the transcriptions for the front and back sides of the tablet were the source of the error. Obviously who ever transcribed the information from the original paper file had made the mistake. (The tablet had been acquired in 1985 before the museum had a computer based collection records system.) That let me off the hook.
So I went to the original file to find out the true identity of the grass-eaters but again found the accession form had the same discrepancy.
I had decided that modern museum professionals should all hang their heads in shame and that we would have to get the cuneiform translated again when I found a note at the very back of the file – the original translation.
Translator's notes for Sumerian clay tablet 85/452
Click above image to see the original transcription.
Note to self: if my records are going to be preserved I’ll have to make sure they are correct.
This post is part of an ongoing series of energy storage posts by intern Brett Szmajda.
When I say ‘solar power’, most people conjure up images of the thin, iridescent blue panels that make a patchwork quilt out of the roofs of suburban houses. But photovoltaic solar power — converting the sun’s rays directly to electricity — is a youngster in the field of solar energy. Its great, great grandfather is solar thermal power; and with the looming threat of climate change, heat from the sun could be a significant part of Australia’s renewable energy transformation.
Solar Heater by Lawence Hargrave
The principle behind solar thermal power should be familiar to anyone who has ignited dry leaves with a magnifying glass. Solar thermal power utilises the heat from the sun’s rays to do useful work. This object from the collection, invented by Lawrence Hargrave, illustrates the Australian inventor’s early attempts to heat water using the sun’s heat. Sunlight is focused by the conical dish onto the central pipe, which is closed at one end so it can hold a small volume of water. As best as we can tell, this was a hobby or proof-of-concept by Hargrave, who was also making small steam engines. However, around the same time as Hargrave was toying with solar, inventors on the other side of the world were patenting larger solar water heaters that could heat water for a household.
Utility companies have taken these basic small-scale ideas and supercharged them, creating solar thermal power stations to yoke the sun’s heat and turn it into electricity. (There are many alternative designs; most involve a lot of mirrors). For example, ‘power tower’ solar thermal power plants use several hundred mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a central tower containing a column of water; this causes the water to boil, producing steam that drives a turbo-generator.
A 'power tower' solar thermal station. Image by Flickr user afloresm, reproduced under Creative Commons licence.
The big problem for solar thermal power generation is that sunlight isn’t constant — a solar thermal plant must contend with clouds, inclement weather, and of course, nightfall. The Solar Tres power plant (a ‘power tower’ design) in Andalusia, Spain has overcome this using a novel form of energy storage: molten salt. Instead of heating water directly, sunlight is concentrated onto a column containing a mix of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate. The heat from the molten salt boils water and turns a turbine, as usual. The advantage of this additional step is that the molten salt can store the accumulated heat (for the electronics junkies in the audience, it’s almost like a ‘heat capacitor’). So when the sun goes behind the clouds or night falls, the heat from the molten salt continues to boil water, turning the turbine and keeping the power flowing. The simple addition of molten salt to the system allows 15 hours of heat storage, meaning that Solar Tres can run around the clock.
Solar thermal plants have been rolled out in a number of locations world-wide, but the uptake in Australia has been limited to two small plants: a 1.5 MW demonstration solar thermal plant has been added to the coal-fired Liddell Power station, and CSIRO has a 0.5 MW solar thermal power station in Mayfield. The biggest recent development was in June 2011, when a 250 MW solar thermal/gas hybrid plant (Solar Dawn) was given 464 million dollars of government funding as part of the Australian Government’s Solar Flagships program. Solar power is a natural fit to the Australian climate, so I’d expect some considerable growth in this sector. Until then, we’re left to wonder why Germany has invested more in solar infrastructure than Australia, when the majority of Australia has more sunshine hours per day than the German average.
A couple of weeks ago the Museum received a request from Peter Miller for access to a collection object. Now this type of access is not always granted as it is resource intensive – an object needs to be moved to a suitable location for viewing and a curator or conservator may need to be on hand to move the object – remember this material is kept by the Museum for the people of NSW in perpetuity and so we want it to last.
However if a genuine benefit to the Museum in the form of new research and information about the object is an outcome then we see this type of request as beneficial. Now this chap wanted to inspect a Canon Canola 1614P, a desk top programmable calculator and not only that he wanted to turn it on. Why? Because Peter was writing (for computer) an emulator and turning it on would help Peter “establish how certain operations worked, when they are not completely described in the operator’s manual.”
I thought this was a great endevour as an emulator of the Canon Canola would let everyone see how it worked without having the real thing and in some form preserve its character for others to enjoy. We checked with conservation of course and bought it up to speed with electronics providing the variac which would introduce current slowly. You can see the result of our efforts below and enjoy Peters vivid description of its operation and peculiarities.
During an interview yesterday regarding the design legacy of Steve Jobs I was probed to cast back and find something comparable. I thought about Olivetti and their penchant, early in the 20th century, for graduates of the Bauhaus who they put to work on shaping their image, corporate and product, with new dynamic graphics and plasticity to product design. This emphasis and understanding and appreciation from the corporate head down of design were later emulated by Braun and Sony (among others) with even more crafted identities.
Then I woke up last night and realised that I should have cast back just a little bit further for a fine example of what might in the day have mirrored Jobs’ recent efforts. What product from the past was placed in peoples hands, a product that had been the domain of the professional made domestic, a product that could be put to a creative use, a product neat and simple in design, portable, easy to operate, empowering, global . . . why the Kodak Brownie of all things and the man behind it George Eastman. Eastman put the power of photography into everyone’s hands . . . with a device just as simple, intuitive and elegant as the ipod . . . point and shoot.
So putting Jobs into some larger perspective he is not the greatest just the latest in a long line of visionary industrialists.
This blog was written by intern Brett Szmajda, who is researching the vital topic of energy storage.
I’m sure that many of you have heard of the Toyota Prius, the Tesla Roadster or the Chevy Volt. Hybrid and fully electric cars are making a big splash at the moment, promising quieter travel with fewer tailpipe emissions. In time, and with improvements in battery technology, it’s conceivable that electric cars might replace gasoline-powered cars.
Would you be surprised if I told you that the battle between electric and gasoline-powered vehicles is over 100 years old?
Powerhouse Museum Collection.
In the early 20th century, gasoline-powered cars and electric cars coexisted. There were even steam cars. Gasoline cars had greater range and could be ‘recharged’ instantly with a jerry-can of petrol, picked up from the general store. But they were loud, smelly, and difficult – even dangerous – to start: the only way to start them was by manually winding a heavy crank shaft, and if the car backfired the crank shaft could break your arm! By comparison, electric cars offered quiet operation and easier start up, with roughly the same limitations that they have today: once you were out of power, you faced a long wait while the car batteries recharged. The pros and cons on each side were roughly balanced, and because of this an interesting innovation race took off.
One big name, fighting for the electric car, was Thomas Edison. Electric cars, back then, ran off rechargeable lead-acid batteries that were essentially the great-great grandfather of the auxiliary lead-acid batteries in today’s cars. Edison thought he could do better, and that brings me to today’s object.
Pictured above is a B-2 nickel-iron (or ‘Edison’) battery. The sectioning of the battery gives us a nice look at its internal workings and lets us see how it compares with later ‘dry cell’ batteries like the Columbia ignitor. B-2 is simply a model number used by Edison to distinguish batteries used for different purposes, much like today’s batteries are AA, AAA, C, D, and so on. This particular model was not used for electric cars (that responsibility fell to its big brother, the A cell); instead, the B-2 was typically reserved ‘for ignition, and other light work’. Other uses for Edison batteries included telegraphy, and running lamps and signals in mines, trains, and ships. Large nickel-iron batteries were even deployed in submarines in World War I.
One of its most desirable features was that the Edison battery was nigh-on indestructable; workers at Edison’s factory performed wear testing by repeatedly throwing the battery out a third-floor window. It was also rugged electrically; the cells could withstand being left uncharged for decades, before working just-like-new after a fresh charge and electrolyte top-up. 
Edison batteries were used to run another item in the Powerhouse collection: the Detroit Electric car (see right). In fact, Edison himself owned one. The Detroit electric boasted a range of about 130 km (if driven conservatively) and a top speed of around 50 km/h. There was a surge of popularity for such cars again during World War I, when the price of petrol rose sharply. A public charging point was even installed at Palmer Street in the Sydney CBD, allowing you to recharge your electric vehicle for a modest fee. (I find this revelation quite funny, as a century later, we’re having debates about ‘range anxiety’ on electric cars and how to recharge your electric car while on vacation).
So whatever happened to the nickel-iron battery? Why do we have a lead-acid battery under the hood of our car nowadays? It was probably a combination of things. The electric starter motor was invented in 1911, eliminating one of the biggest drawbacks of petrol cars. Part of it might be the limitations of the Edison battery: it cost more to manufacture than a lead-acid battery; it was greatly inefficient at low temperatures, rendering it almost useless in winter; and it performed poorly in situations where a high discharge or high recharge rate was required. I’d also speculate that the market also played a role: petrol car manufacturers likely had business agreements with certain battery companies. Because of its wide range of other uses, the Edison battery was produced for over half a century, with production only stopping after Edison Storage Battery Co. was acquired by Exide Batteries.
So if you happen to be digging around in the grandparents’ tool shed and find an old Edison battery, you can tell your friends that you’ve found a part of one of the first electric cars. Hell, if you feel like fun, replace the electrolyte, and try (carefully!) giving it a charge. It’ll probably still work.
85/2157 Book 'Decorum' (etiquette & dress), USA, 1879, Collection:Powerhouse Museum (photography Rebecca Evans;Powerhouse Museum)
The knife and fork were not made for playthings, and should not be used as such when people are waiting at the table for the food to be served. Do not hold them erect in your hands at each side of your plate, not cross them on your plate when you have finished, nor make a noise with them.
A10189 Place setting, 9 pieces, sterling silver/stainless steel, used by Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to Australia in 1954, Collection: Powerhouse Museum (photography Sotha Bourn, Powerhouse Museum)
I often wonder what people of the past would think about our contemporary eating habits. Sitting in any odd food hall I feel that past manners have been replaced with convenient and fast food. But, what were the manners of the past?
After a short look through our collection I came across some interesting books on manners and etiquette. For those who are etiquette unacquainted, here’s a brief run down of some of the dos and don’t of the past…
D6423 Model apple, 'Moss Incomparable', wax, modelled at Sydney Technical College, probably opainted by Charles Tom, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Australia, 1900, Collection: Powerhouse Museum (photography Kate Scott, Powerhouse Museum)
‘Cheese’ must be eaten with a fork….Never bite fruit… Do not scrape your plate to get the last drop… Never use a napkin in the place of a handkerchief by wiping the forehead or blowing the nose with it…
94/235/1-10 Sheet of labels, Fountain tomato soup, consisting of four labels for 16 ounce cans, Collection: Powerhouse Museum (photography Scott Donkin Powerhouse Museum)
… it is considered vulgar to dip a piece of bread into the preserves or gravy upon your plate and then bite into it… Soup should be eaten with the side of the spoon, not from the point and there should be no noise… Never if possible cough or sneeze at the table…
90/501-1 Potographic print, black & white, imae of 3 wine bottles, max Dupain(photographer)/ Alister Morrison (designer), Sydney, 1958-63, Collection: Powerhouse Museum
…if anything unpleasant is found in the food, such as a hair in the bread or a fly in the coffee, remove it without remark…
Young ladies should not indulge in a variety of wines, nor indeed in very much wine … When drinking do not empty the glass at one gulp; it is very vulgar to do so..
94/63/1-57/10 Glass negative, quarter plate, Palmer's Mystery Hike No 2, Tom Lennon, Sydney, Australia, 10 July 1932, Collection: Powerhouse Museum
… Eat neither too fast nor too slow… Never lean back in your chair nor sit too near or too far from the table.. food is to be eaten quietly and not ravenously .. It is not considered polite to eat up the last scrape of every food or every crumb of bread.’
Ref:
‘Etiquette for Ladies’, Ward Lock & Co, Australia /England 1925
‘Decorum’(etiquette& dress), USA, 1879
‘Etiquette: A handbook for all occasions to suit Australian conditions’ Ross Bros, Pty Ltd Publications, Sydney, Australia date unknown
Pyke, L M ‘Australian Etiquette: Rules of Good Society’, Wilke & Co Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia, 1938
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