Following his death in 1862, the museum was presented with the collection of geological specimens including minerals and fossils formed by Vice-Admiral Robert Wauchope. He lived at Moorhouse Hall, Cumberland, and eventually retired to Dacre Lodge near Penrith. His naval career spanned thirty-six years for three of which he was stationed at St. Helena where he met Napoleon. Wauchope's collection was originally displayed in twenty eight cases which included a standing case of twelve tiers.
During his lifetime the study of geology developed into a science raising questions which undermined accepted notions of the Creation. To dismiss these, Wauchope, a man of strong high-principled religious convictions, published a tract 'Proofs of the Possible Cause and Recent Date of the Boulder Drift, Connecting it with the Post-Tertiary Period and Noachian Deluge'. In it he countered the new idea of the wide dispersal of rock by the action of glaciers, reaffirming the cause to have been Noah's Flood of the Bible. It questioned in turn the ideas of Darwin associated with the new thinking.
He invented the 'time-ball' which signalled the time from shore to sea for the adjustment of ships' chronometers, essential for the calculation of longitude. This was a hollow metal sphere triggered by a device to drop down a pole at a precise time. Examples can still be seen at observatories at Greenwich, Deal, Calton Hill in Edinburgh, Cape Town, Sydney, and Lyttelton in New Zealand.
