Opened today (23 June) to coincide with International Women in Engineering Day, the Engineers gallery in the London institution is designed to both inspire young people to pursue engineering careers and to challenge common misconceptions of what all engineers do – dirty work in hard hats and overalls, for example.
Marking the 10th anniversary of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize), the gallery showcases previous winners alongside some of the most exciting engineering innovations of recent years.
“As of today, we have a physical space in this iconic museum that is dedicated specifically to engineering, to tell you stories of these innovations, the people behind them, and – really importantly – why they matter to our lives,” said Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, CEO of both the QEPrize and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The exhibition includes more than 70 engineering objects, from CMR Surgical’s cutting-edge Versius surgical robot arm to the world’s first digital colour camera, a miniature atomic clock that the entire GPS system depended on, and wing shape models from the development of the Concorde. It tells the stories of 60 engineers from a broad range of industries, including agriculture, biomedical engineering and aerospace.
The gallery “also seeks to address the longstanding inequality in the number of young women being accepted onto university engineering degrees (18%) and in the UK engineering workforce (16.5%),” a Science Museum announcement said.
“It's not a coincidence that we're opening the gallery on International Women in Engineering Day,” said Dr Sillem. “It's absolutely vital that we have an engineering profession that reflects the society that it serves, and at the moment we still have a long way to go. In the UK in particular, we suffer from very outdated stereotypes and caricatures of who engineers are and what they do.
“This gallery provides a fantastic opportunity for young people… to challenge those outdated stereotypes and see for themselves, who are the engineers that impact lives? And what does it feel like to be an engineer?”
Changing perceptions
Set on the first floor of the museum, overlooking iconic exhibits such as the giant red Mill Engine from Burnley Ironworks Company, the Engineers gallery pairs physical objects with their creators’ stories, displayed prominently next to their photos throughout.
Featured female engineers include Professor Larissa Suzuki, computer scientist and engineer at Google and NASA, Tanda Kabanda, a software engineer for fashion giants such as Asos and Selfridges, Professor Becky Shipley OBE, UCL healthcare engineer and mathematician who invented a non-invasive ventilator for Covid-19 patients in record time, and Dr Alice Bunn OBE, chief executive of IMechE and president of the UKSpace trade association.
The importance of displaying work by female engineers so prominently is “huge”, said Dr Sillem to Professional Engineering. “This is a great opportunity to just present engineering on its own terms, and to create a much more rounded view of who these people are, and why they matter to us, and why it's so relevant to our lives. And I do think that that is a really, really good foundation for trying to get that step change that we haven't achieved yet, in terms of the diversity of people who choose to come into engineering.”
That sort of representation can be immediately effective, said Maite Carreras Orobengoa, satellite engineer at London company OneWeb. Orobengoa is also featured in the gallery – along with a life-size replica of a OneWeb communications satellite, which is suspended from the ceiling.
“You need to see people that look like you to see ‘Oh, it’s actually achievable’,” she said. “When I go to schools, the little girls say ‘But you look like a normal person!’, or ‘You look like me!’ Having these kinds of references in the museum, I think it shows we can be completely normal, completely different people. It's just – do your creativity and what you want to do, right?”
The number of featured female engineers should be inspiring for young visitors, said Uresha Patel, surgical engineer at CMR Surgical, who trained the first surgeons to use the Versius surgical robot in a human patient.
“The stats at the minute are so harrowing,” she said. “16.5% of the UK workforce in engineering are female, which is a very small percentage, and so having this gallery celebrating some of the fantastic work a lot of females are doing, and the diversity amongst engineering, is going to really help that next generation of engineers to realise you can also be here.”
‘Creative impulse’
Alongside the modern exhibits, such as the Ventura CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) device developed at UCL during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a display of older objects from the museum’s archive. This includes James Watt’s ‘experimentalising steam kettle’, which the museum says inspired the future steam engine engineer as he watched steam push against and lift the kettle lid.
“This really symbolises the creative impulse, which does so much to underpin the engineering profession,” said Ben Russell, Science Museum curator of mechanical engineering.
A wall-mounted video and board encourage visitors to ‘think like an engineer’, guiding them through a series of creative questions and showing them how engineers approach them. “How will you change the world?” it asks.
“You always want to do something which is beyond the museum. So if we get everybody thinking like engineers, I think we’d be in a much happier place,” said Russell.
“What the museum does… is just provide that spark of ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought about that!’ I think if we can do that, we're doing pretty well. We want people to pursue careers and STEM subjects.”
The gallery was funded by the QEPrize and sponsored by US firm MathWorks, which produces mathematical computing software for engineers, scientists and mathematicians.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.