On occassion, the Teylers Museum is compared to a time machine. It is the oldest museum of the Netherlands and all its rooms are still in their original form. It is the perfect place to see how the modern notion of ‘museum’ grew out of the ideals of the Enlightenment. In the 18th and 19th century Teylers steadily increased its collection of scientific instruments: not a collector’s mania, but done for scientific and educational purposes. The large collection presents us with an impressive overview of the developments during two centuries of science. Teylers Museum is the only place in the world that has such a large original collection that is still open to the public.

The museum focuses less on individual objects and more on the entire collection, which is larger than the sum of its parts. Pictura, strong in so-called contextual publishing, developed an innovative site for Teylers that enhances that historical setting and the underlying connections. We made a website centered on the instrument room, a collection of nineteenth century scientific instruments that have been used for research in fields such as electricity, sound, light, etc. The room is dominated by the largest friction charge machine in the world. From 1785 to 1800 it was used extensively for research and after 1800 for demonstrations.

On the site all objects are displayed within the context of the historical set-up. People can look around and a movie provides a dynamic impression of the room. The shelves of all the cabinets have been photographed with a very high resolution wide angle lens. This way people can see everything in them like in a diorama. All objects in the cabinets can also be viewed separately. The entire collection from the intrument room, hundreds of wonderous physics instruments, has been photographed by Pictura. To do this, we first made a studio set-up in the room so visitors could also view what we were doing. On a roundshot-object-rig with a 120 cm base and a 1000 kilogram loading capacity all the instruments from the museum room were photographed from all sides: 24 images for each object. This was done so the objects could be viewed from every angle, from far off and close up. In Memorix Image all the images received an accompanying description.

Simultaneously a link was included with each object to The Practice of Science in the Nineteenth Century: Teaching and Research Apparatus in the Teyler Museum, by Gerard Turner. This scientific work is integrated with the site for everyone who wants to know more about the wonderous instruments in the Teylers' Museum Instrument Room.

(Right now, the room and the instruments are not open to the public due to a restauration of the room floor. Soon this part of the collection should be available again.)