Science Museum

The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and today is one of the city’s major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually. Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission. Temporary exhibitions, however, may incur an admission fee. It is part of the Science Museum Group, having merged with the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester in 2012. The Science Museum now holds a collection of over 300,000 items, including such famous items as Stephenson’s Rocket, Puffing Billy (the oldest surviving steam locomotive), the first jet engine, a reconstruction of Francis Crick and James Watson’s model of DNA, some of the earliest remaining steam engines (Including an example of a Newcomen steam engine, the world’s first steam engine), a working example of Charles Babbage’s Difference engine, the first prototype of the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now, and documentation of the first typewriter. It also contains hundreds of interactive exhibits. As of 2019 170,000 items which are not on current display are stored at Blythe House in West Kensington, in addition to storage at the Science Museum at Wroughton, a 220-hectare (545-acre) former RAF base near Swindon owned by the Museum since 1979. Blythe House storage is shared with the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and also houses facilities including a conservation laboratory, a photographic studio, and a quarantine area where newly arrived items are examined.