The Big Hop

David Rooney is a British historian and museum curator. He was born in northeast England in 1974 to parents who ran a noted clock restoration business. He moved to London in 1995 to take a traineeship at the Science Museum, where he encountered – and was later responsible for – the aeroplane that won the Big Hop contest.

Over an almost thirty-year museum career, David has specialized in bringing historical stories vividly alive. As the Science Museum’s Keeper of Technology and Engineering, he led a team of ten specialist curators with combined responsibility for one-third of the museum’s vast collection and oversaw internationally significant artefacts ranging from art and aeronautics to space technology and nuclear power.


Among the exhibitions David curated was the critically acclaimed 2012 retrospective of the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing. David also curated the museum’s RIBA-award-winning mathematics gallery, designed by Dame Zaha Hadid, which opened in December 2016 and was widely commended.