This article was taken from the August 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
If you think you've got clutter at home, Britain's science museums have it worse. In a yawning 220-hectare airfield near Swindon, the Science Museum at Wroughton uses six aeroplane hangars, each the size of a football field, as warehouses. They are piled high with around 16,000 "large objects" that the Science Museum in London, the Museum of Science and Industry at Manchester, the National Railway Museum at York, the National Media Museum at Bradford and the National Railway Museum at Shildon can't quite squeeze in. "It's like the shed every bloke dreams of having," says Matt Moore, Wroughton's site manager.
Stored there is everything from a Russian supercomputer obtained after the Cold War (it's not known how it reached the UK) to the Lockheed Constellation airliner in which the Rolling Stones toured in 1973. There is no public access to the relics, but researchers can request to view specific objects. "We don't collect beautiful things," Moore says. "We collect objects that represent a significant shift in the way engineers and scientists thought." Wired went exploring.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
