On page 183 of his book Cubic Forms, in the bibliographical remarks to the section on the twenty-seven lines, Manin quotes Henderson's historical summary:

Indeed Sylvester once remarked, in his characteristical florid style: "Surely with as good reason as had Archimedes to have the cylinder, cone, and sphere engraved on his tombstone might our distinguished countrymen leave testamentary directions for the cubic eikosiheptagram to be engraved on theirs."

If Cayley and Salmon had wished to follow Sylvester's advice and to insert a clause in their wills, directing that an eikosiheptagram be engraved upon their monuments, they would have had no certainty of the correct fulfilment of their directions until the year 1869, when Christian Wiener made a model of a cubic surface showing twenty-seven real lines lying upon it. This achievement of Wiener, Sylvester once remarked, is one of the discoveries "which must for ever make 1869 stand out in the Annals of Science."

Klein exhibited a complete set of models of cubic surfaces at the World's Exposition in Chicago in 1894, including Clebsch's symmetrical model of the diagonal surface and Klein's model of the cubic surface having four real conical points. Models of the typical cases of all the principal forms of cubic surfaces have been constructed by Rodenberg for Brill's collections; and these plaster models may now be purchased.

Manin concludes: "Henderson's book appeared in 1911. Sylvester's eloquence and the plaster models disappeared together with the Victorian era... "