page_title: Teylers Oval Room
section_title: Function
hierarchical_section_title: Teylers Oval Room / Function
caption_attribution_description: Photo of instruments in Teyler's Oval Room, Teylers Museum, Spaarne, Haarlem Thomas Newcomen steam engine (1702 model), built by Edward Nairne around 1770, purchased by the Teylers Museum in 1839
context_page_description: The Oval Room in the Teylers Museum was the first part of the museum that was opened in 1784. It could be entered through the garden of the fundatiehuis, the former home of Pieter Teyler van der Hulst. The building has an oval shape built around its centerpiece, a mineralogical cabinet. The Oval Room consists of two floors; the ground floor with its display cabinets and a gallery of books that connects to the Teylers Library. On top of the room, on the roof, the astronomical observatory used to be a landmark that could be seen for miles along the river Spaarne. The gallery and observatory are longer accessible to the public, though the gallery can be seen from the ground floor.
context_section_description: The Teylers Museum, and with that the Oval Room, was the first museum open to the public in the Netherlands. Though the Oval room included a library, observatory, and lab to show experiments to the public, the concept of a museum did not really exist yet when it was completed in 1781. At the time, the Teylers Oval room was seen more as a very large version of a curiosity cabinet with room to show large demonstrations of technological innovations, such as were done with the electrostatic generator. Some of the directors felt it should really contain a museum-like collection.
  In the first years the central piece was not a cabinet, but a table on which experiments would be done. The central table would be moved out of the way when the electrostatic generator was going to be used. The drawings and minerals in the collection were stored in this central piece The instruments were stored in cabinets on the first floor.
caption: Model of a Thomas Newcomen steam engine built by Edward Nairne in 1770 - one example of the many instruments in the room that was formerly used for experiments
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