In 1894 Strand Magazine sent a correspondent into the carefully guarded Crime Museum of New Scotland Yard. The journalist was despatched to report on a new exhibit containing every ‘dangerous species’ of bomb, or ‘dynamite relic’ that had been found intact during the Fenian campaign of the 1880s. The contents of the Black Museum, as it was also known, were, like the exhibits in British Museum's Secretum, never intended for public inspection as they were considered by the authorities to be far too hazardous for popular consumption. Instead, these volatile specimens were put on display for the sole and very serious purpose of instructing the Metropolitan Police in the latest developments in subversive activity. Here, budding detectives, and the occasional if very strictly vetted visitor, became acquainted with what the Strand termed the ‘almost historic’ materials amassed by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Explosives, Sir Vivian Majendie, CB, HM. However the curious public, on the other hand, could only learn about these explosive and ‘too precious’ artefacts from a safe distance in the pages of the popular journal as part of a course of necessary lessons on the important but little understood topic of political violence. The exhibits in the Black Museum, it promised, would never become a public attraction, even though readers were assured that the experience of viewing them was ‘the finest and most complete nerve-tester in the world!’ Their purpose within this special museum was to educate officers in the most recent developments in the lethal technology of the ‘infernal machine’, or improvised bomb.