Properly known as the National Gallery of Practical Science, Blending Instruction with Amusement, it stood on the north side of the Lowther Arcade.
In the early 1830s it contained some 250 machines, devices and scientific models such as a pocket thermometer, a gas mask, an oxyhydrogen microscope, a steam gun and, later, demonstrations of daguerreotypes, electricity and magnetism.
In the 1840s the gallery became an amusement hall and in 1852 the Royal Marionette Theatre. The Lowther Arcade was demolished in 1904.
Excerpted from The London Encyclopaedia by kind permission of the Publishers, Pan MacMillan.
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