Extraordinary objects. Remarkable minds.
Stories worth discovering.
Guillaume Le Gentil knew Manila had good observing weather. He left anyway. His voyage account explains the choice that took him to a ruined palace in Pondicherry for the transit of Venus—and records the observation made by the friend he left behind.
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Mary Kingsley’s 1895 fish collection had to survive bargaining, a shortage of alcohol and the Ogooué rapids. Three specimens from Kondo-Kondo eventually reached a London museum, where an adult and two young fish helped Albert Günther distinguish a new species.
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Jeanne Baret carried plant folders through the Strait of Magellan and kept working after Bougainville’s ships moved on. A Mauritian specimen and an abandoned botanical name help trace the labour behind a collection credited to Philibert Commerson.
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Mary Anning had a strange skeleton to sell and two wealthy customers to consider. Her letter from Lyme Regis reveals the judgement behind a price, before the fossil became a scientific sensation and a museum specimen.
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Fresh earth kept appearing on a cleared Roman floor. Charles Darwin used years of experiments and a network of observers to explain how worms could gradually bury traces of human work.
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Beatrix Potter exchanged paintings for parcels of fungi. The specimens led her from accurate portraits to a harder undertaking: growing spores, persuading sceptics and producing a slide that would perform when required.
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01 /Towards horizons not yet charted
02 /A world in a leaf, a wing, a stone
03 /When wonder became an instrument
04 /The art of giving curiosity a home
05 /When craftsmanship finds its voice
06 /The beautiful logic of things that work
Zeiss · Stativ Vb · 1881 catalogueA brass microscope. A maker and a physicist. Follow Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe into a story about the craft of seeing and the ideas behind it.
Take a closer look Authentic Zeiss Stativ Vb · Photograph: MikroSammlerA person. An instrument. A moment that changed the view.
We follow the traces of human curiosity.