Skip Navigation or Skip to Content
Search our website

Key in a search term below to search our website.

Making the Museum

Science and Technology
20 min watch

Explore our collections
Back

More than 10 million objects make their home at the National Museum of Scotland. Discover the secrets of our treasures with this unique five-part series.

How do you get more than 3,000 objects ready for display in ten brand new galleries?

This is the tale of how our curators and conservators applied stitches to a giant porcelain lion, played jigsaw with a priceless marble fireplace, restored one of the World's first flying machines and uncovered many other surprising stories along the way!

Episode 1: Meissen lion

How do you conserve a giant 18th-century porcelain lion? Conservator Diana talks historic repairs, steri-strips and fifty shades of white (paint).

Episode 2: Working models

They've been firm favourites with our visitors for almost 150 years. Find out just what makes our working models so special with technology historian and former Keeper of Science and Technology, Alex Hayward.

Episode 3: The Hamilton Palace fireplace wall

In this episode, Dr Godfrey Evans and conservator Charles Stable take us back in time to visit Hamilton Palace, once Scotland's grandest stately home and biggest treasure trove.

Episode 4: Pilcher's Hawk

Four years before the Wright brothers conquered the skies, Percy Pilcher devised a powered flying machine and intended to demonstrate it to the world. But it was never to be... In this episode, Louise Innes introduces us to one of the great Victorian aviators and explores how we're looking after the oldest surviving aircraft in Britain.

Episode 5: Panoramic wallpaper

In this episode, paper conservators Vicki and Lisa explain how they're looking after a rare full set of French panoramic wallpaper.

More like this

Tags

Back to top