Behind the Scenes: Victorian Science Museum Glaisdale near Whitby

Yorkshire Post

The Victorian Science Museum is based in Glaisdale near Whitby. Yorkshire Post photographer, Tony Johnson went along to chat to owner, Anthony Swift, about why it is so appealing.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Anthony Swift, I run the Museum of Victorian Science and we're at Glasdale near Whitby,

00:07 North Yorkshire.

00:13 It's a science museum and we've been open 22 years and we cover subjects like x-rays,

00:20 radioactivity, electrostatics, phosphorescence, fluorescence, all sorts of things, but we

00:28 have a humour side as well, so it's a sort of entertainment plus education. We start

00:35 off with x-rays and we do x-rays and we're in the dark a lot, we see the first x-ray

00:40 ever made and the subject of its discovery. Then we do radioactivity and how the Curies

00:47 made their, discovered their elements of polonium, radium and actinium and so forth. And we move

00:54 on and do other subjects of physics, not in an in-depth way of a university, obviously

01:01 we're not doing that, but enough for people who don't know too much about science to be

01:08 interested.

01:09 I've collected this sort of stuff for many, many years. We moved here, this was my wife's

01:16 mother's house when she died and we moved here. And I'd got all this stuff out and she

01:21 said, "Do you know, all this junk", as she called it, "collected, you could make a museum

01:28 of this." Well, ding-a-ling, and we made a museum of it and we've been open 22 years.

01:34 They've all got names, they were all used in the 19th and early 20th century in the

01:40 discovery of physics matter. Some people come here, they know absolutely nothing. Some people

01:46 are professors of particle physics, we get the whole range of everybody, it doesn't matter.

01:52 Obviously I'm very interested in what I do, yes, it's my subject, but I don't know about

01:57 passion. People do use this word a lot, I'm not too happy with it, but yes, it's what

02:04 consumes me, yes.

02:12 [Sound of saw]

02:14 [Sound of saw]

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