Elmar du Plessis

Collections Management - Humanities

A peek into our ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’

BY Sudre Havenga and Elmar du Plessis October 31, 2024

Could this be a bubble off?

In the Museum’s collection is a dry razor that resembles a modern bubble off or fluff shaver.

The Thorens Riviera is a gents’ dry razor manufactured in Switzerland in the 1950s. What makes this razor unique is its clockwork mechanism. The mechanism is wound up by turning the large chrome handle on the back similar to winding up a clock. This means no batteries or electricity is needed to power the shaver. In 1971, a similar razor was on board the Apollo 14 Moon mission.

Collections Management - Humanities

The story of a priest called Venturi and a tractor manufactured a century later

BY Elmar du Plessis October 17, 2023

Giovanni Battista Venturi was born in 1746 in Bibbiano, a small village in the Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. At the age of 23, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and, in the same year, was appointed as a teacher of logic at the University of Reggio Emilia. In 1774, he moved to the University of Modena as a professor of geometry and philosophy. Over the next years, Venturi would also have success as a university-level mathematics instructor, a civil engineer, a politician, a statesman, a confidant of Napoleon I Bonaparte, and, in later years, as a renowned historian.

Collections Management - Humanities

Mills of the Eastern Free State

BY Elmar du Plessis March 23, 2022

The discovery of diamonds in 1869 and of gold in 1886, and the influx of several thousand fortune seekers which followed these events created new markets for grain products in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. This, in turn, encouraged the cultivation of wheat and mealies in the Free State and Basutoland (Lesotho).

Collections Management - Humanities

The Bloemfontein Flood of 1904

BY Elmar du Plessis January 17, 2020

With the recent heavy downpours in Bloemfontein and the images and videos thereof popping up all over Facebook, one cannot help but be reminded of one of the biggest disasters to ever hit Bloemfontein, the flood of 1904.

In the early years of Bloemfontein its famous Bloem Spruit regularly flooded its banks after a heavy rainstorm. One bystander described it as follows: “A magnificent sight after a good downpour, the water, brown and foaming, shooting up as it flung itself against the huge boulders in its way, or swirling and eddying around them.” This, however, was under normal circumstances.

Collections Management - Humanities

NEWS: Radio broadcasting and South African “firsts”

BY Elmar du Plessis March 29, 2019

In 1902 the Cape Parliament introduced the first radio legislation in the world: “Electric Telegraph shall be interpreted as including any system or means of conveying signs, signals or communication by electricity, magnetism, electro-magnetism or other like agencies, whether with or without the aid of wires, and including the system commonly known as Wireless Telegraphy or Aetheric Signalling and any improvement and development of such system.” The first wireless licences in the world were also introduced in South Africa (1902), and by 1910 the country was producing its own radio equipment.