Katy Barrett

Focus on… the conservation of Gassed by John Singer Sargent Ahead of the centre-stage redisplay of John Singer Sargent’s Gassed in the new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries, the monumental first world war painting has undergone significant conservation. Varnish removal, remedial structural work, as well as frame conservation, has revealed afresh the visual power of the work. Following conservation, cutting edge technology captured high-resolution data in 3D, colour and infrared.

Picture a large copper machine covered in silver piping and wires. This image, which is on the cover of Curious Devices and Mighty Machines, could be a submarine or a robot from the golden age of sci-fi. In fact, it is part of the Large Electron-Positron Collider at the nuclear research laboratory Cern near Geneva, retired in 1995 and donated to National Museums Scotland. This intriguing science object serves to introduce Alberti’s book both visually and conceptually.

No Access About this book About the authors Reviews Why make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century.