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The most prized tools in the sixteenth-century collection tended to be weapons that highlighted a noble collector's military role. In the contemporary university collection, tools of measurement predominate, reflecting the importance of physical analysis to almost every discipline.
Historical costume
Dramatic Arts
Historical costumes provide ways for designers to recreate period dress: modern, highly detailed recreations reproduced the same structure and look of the garment (even if the material must be different). Such accurate dress provides a means for an actor to feel his or her body into an earlier manner of walking and gesturing. The particular constrictions of a garment produces corresponding restrictions in movement: no woman wearing this dress is ever going to be able to run or move the way a modern woman can.
Submarine
Physics Electronics Shop
The yellow submarine resonates with the flying turtle in the curiosity cabinet space; both have the ability to dive through water, and are displayed floating in mid-air. The yellow submarine, which has pop culture associations with the Beatles' song, was created to photograph under water with a camera its nose
while being towed.
Robot arm
Mechanical EngineeringThis robot arm, once at the leading edge of technology, is now being reconditioned: it still has great teaching value.
Horn
Eichheim Collection,
Music
Geologist's Pick
Geology
Some tools have remained unchanged for centuries - like the geologist's pick. Others, especially in the sciences, go out of date in just a few years. But people still save them, sometimes for teaching purposes, sometimes for sentimental or aesthetic reasons.
The geologists pick, unlike the robot, is still useful and is an example of a tool whose form has remained unchanged for centuries.
Ames Window, "Rotating Trapezoid Demonstration"
Psychology
The Ames window transforms the viewer's gaze from that of an activating element in the curiosity cabinet to an object of study, and further suggests that human perception of the world may be flawed. As the window pivots, it tricks the viewer's eye into perceiving the suspended rod as passing immaterially through the frame of the window.
