Embodied Odysseys: Relics of stories about journeys through past, present, and future

• The paper deals with collections as analogues of the concept determining our sense of time itself.
• The paper deals with the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, the Science Museum, and the Deutsches Museum..
• In the paper I treat the formative effects of the foundation and early years of these museums.
• The Science Museum in London serves as a case study for a more detailed view.
• Inherited collections embody traditions which strongly influence the interpretation of “contemporary scientific heritage”.

This paper argues that the heritage represented by a museum should be seen not just in its individual objects but also in the relationships between them. The Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers and the Science Museum in London, the earliest great European science museums, were deeply concerned with the relationship between science and practice. The foundation speeches of the Deutsches Museum emphasised the concern with both past and future. Such ancestry provided hard-to-escape templates within which collections were built up over the subsequent century and more. Thus the Science Museum’s biotechnology collection developed at the very end of the twentieth century and albeit based on detailed historical research reflects the same concerns with science–technology relations as could be seen in the 1876 Loan Exhibition which started off the Science Museum. The physical presence of such carefully-structured accumulations of objects could embody and reinforce the reality of such categories as pure and applied science.