Communications, transport, industry, engineering, energy and medicine: how have scientific and technological inventions changed our lives?

The suite of six new Science and Technology galleries explore the history of innovation in Scotland and across the world through interactive games and thought-provoking displays at the National Museum of Scotland. The galleries feature objects covering over 250 years of enquiry and innovation, with worldwide resonance in areas as diverse as engineering, medicine, transport, communication, physics and chemistry.

Highlights include one of the two oldest railway locomotives in the world; a 2-tonne Copper Cavity from CERN’s Large Electron Positron Collider; three Formula 1 racing cars, including David Coulthard’s Red Bull team car; an Apple-1, one of the world’s first personal home computers; the world’s first pneumatic tyre, developed in Scotland by John Boyd Dunlop; Britain’s oldest motorcycle; one of John Logie Baird’s earliest televisions; as well as ground-breaking contemporary initiatives like the world’s first bionic arm and a mouse kidney grown from stem cells.

All the displays aim to offer an enjoyable and inspiring experience, enabling visitors to discover our past, present and potential futures. Children and adults alike can enjoy memorable hands-on activities, including newly restored nineteenth-century working engineering models; a Formula 1 racing car simulator; working hot-air balloons; and a human-sized hamster wheel which visitors can drive to generate illuminating electricity…

This is part of a £14.1 million redevelopment and opening of ten major new galleries at the National Museum of Scotland in its 150th anniversary year.