- Museum of the History of Science - https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk -

Millennial Loans

Autumn, 1999




TIME is one of the strongest themes in the Museum’s collections and is a recurrent motif for exhibitions elsewhere marking the year 2000. While the Museum is closed several items from the collections are being loaned to such exhibitions. A Swedish calendar in the form of a walking stick and five English coin calendars are being lent to the exhibition ‘Le temps, vite’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, while four sundials by three different members of the same family are being borrowed by the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.


The exhibition in Paris is a multidisciplinary presentation of artistic creations dealing with time, science, technology and philosophy, organized around the idea that changes in the way we understand time have come about because man has learned to control the acceleration of speed. It runs from the 12th January to the 17th April.


The Wolfenbüttel exhibition will take place in the Ducal Library and looks at the work of the Hager family of clock and instrument makers. Duke August the Younger of Braunschweig and Lüneburg was an ardent collector of instruments and clocks. His successor, Rudolf August, appointed Wolfgang and Michael Tobias Hager to look after the Kunstkammer in 1668 and other members of the same family were active in Germany until the end of the eighteenth century. The exhibition runs in Wolfenbüttel from the 11th December, 1999 to the 17th February, 2000. –