The Strange Case of Samuelson's Archive

Abstract

This is not a detective story, but concerns the chance discovery of an archive collection which - having miraculously survived the vicissitudes of time - has apparently become forgotten and, effectively, lost to scholarship.

Between 1882 and 1884, the Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction (the Samuelson Report) was published. 1 Its terms of reference were:

'To inquire into the instruction of the industrial classes of certain foreign countries in technical and other su bjects for the purpose of comparison with that of the corresponding classes in this country; and into the influence of such instruction on manufacturing and other industries at home and abroad'.