Last week, a Goss printing press moved into Ingenium’s new Collections Conservation Centre in Ottawa. At 32 metric tons — the approximate equivalent of five African elephants — the press is one of the heaviest pieces in Canada’s national science and technology collection.

A biochemist, avid cross-country skier, and former science budget analyst speaks on the joys of collecting, the lessons learned, and the importance of preserving material culture.

Ingenium’s collection includes a lot of intriguing artifacts — and some of them even have star power!

In 1997 Jerry Fielder contacted the then-director of the Collection and Research Division of the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Geoff Rider, with an offer of a donation. Each year the Museum receives several hundred offers from across Canada, yet Geoff immediately recognized that this was not an average proposal. Since 1979 Jerry had been a curator and an assistant to prominent Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh.

The Petrovic Collection at the Canada Science and Technology Museum is a collection of over 130 mathematical instruments from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries. These instruments came to the museum in 1980 from Dr. George Petrovic, a Serbian-born architect who collected them in order to document the connections between mathematical practice and architecture in the eastern Mediterranean regions, as well as countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire. The collection is now at the centre

The Ingenium’s collection of ranges, includes a variety of appliances — fireboxes, table stoves, cooking plates, buffet stoves — and illustrates the main innovations made to these electric household cooking appliances between 1900 and 2000.

Industrial transfers were a form of decal commonly used in Canada, and around the world, replacing the expensive method of hand painting coats of arms, trademarks, signs, ornaments, letters and numbers on railway equipment, ships and industrial machinery.