Details emerged today about the Science Museum’s impending 100th birthday.

The venerable South Ken institution will reach its century on 26 June (as will ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, holder of Elvis’ wallet – but he’s been dead some 12 years and we’re unlikely to see a comeback special).

A three-day party will lead celebrations, with live music and the usual generic entertainment. A ‘centenary trail’ will take visitors around the museum’s most revered holdings. The public will then be asked to vote on the object that has had most impact on human history.

Two new galleries will be opened later this year: Cosmos & Culture charts the history of astronomy; and Watt’s Workshop is a faithful reconstruction of the great engineer’s tinkering space. Meanwhile, the Who Am I? and Antenna Futures galleries will be refurbished. No such luck for the communications exhibition, which still sports cutting edge displays such as this.

1909 was something of a triumph for science. Most notably, the discovery of the Burgess Shale did that ‘shedding light’ business on our understanding of life on earth. The year also saw the development of blood group classification by Karl Landsteiner, production of the syphilis drug Salvarsan by Paul Ehrlich, and the development of Bakelite by Leo Baekeland.