O Say Can You See?

Remember the Merchant Marines

One of the benefits of working in the National Museum of American History is sometimes you run into your own history. The first time I stepped in to our electricity exhibit I saw fans and toasters that I recognized from my parents’ basement. Our soon to be reinstalled Taking America to Lunch exhibit of lunch boxes brought me back to the school cafeteria, as it does for so many people.

Poster, U.S. Merchant Marine War Shipping Administration, 1942.

My most recent encounter occurred when I took a pre-opening tour of On the Water, a new exhibit about our country’s maritime history. Towards the end is a section about the Merchant Marines, an often overlooked branch of the military. My Dad was in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and as the exhibit says, “though not part of the navy, these ships delivered troops, supplies and equipment that won the war.”

My dad was one of those vets who did not talk much about his service until very late in life. Even then he just had a couple of favorite stories, particularly one about watching a torpedo soar under their ship because they had just off-loaded their cargo, so the ship was higher in the water than the Germans had calculated. Luckily my Dad was able to visit the WWII Memorial and bask in the glory that he and so many others deserved. But the Merchant Marines were not as featured as the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force and Marines. That is why I was so pleasantly surprised to see this section of the exhibit. To recognize the photo of exactly the type of Liberty Ship he served on. To learn he was one of 6,000 officers commissioned at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. To read about how crucial their role was. 

Seeing it all so beautifully displayed and explained made me very happy and proud, and sad that he is not able to see it himself. That is why I will make sure my daughters see the exhibit, so the next generation can continue the personal history. And that is why I encourage others to visit the American History Museum. Even though it is a large Museum, it can be a very personal place. Who knows what treasure you will find?

Kathy Sklar is the business program manager at the National Museum of American History.

How many people does it take to clean a canton?

The voicemail message from the Daily Programs Coordinator sounded a little stressed: “How can we clean the canton?” Very carefully, I thought… this is a 16×18-foot piece of blue wool, made up of twelve 18-inch wide strips hand-stitched together. Four times a day, seven days a week, one of our talented actresses tells the story of Mary Pickersgill, the Baltimore seamstress who sewed the original Star-Spangled Banner (which is now safely ensconced in its own protective gallery). The performer invites children to help her place 15 stars on the re-created canton—one for each state in the Union in 1813—which she has spread out in the Museum’s Flag Hall. Evidently one of the youngsters, or a toddler sibling, had had a slight accident on one corner.

So, the canton needed to be cleaned—thankfully, we had an understudy canton waiting in the wings. Easy, my office mate and I thought (we’re long-time program producers, we know what to do!). There is a very-large capacity washing machine in the building; we’ll run it through that. Not so fast! A call to the Star-Spangled Banner’s conservator and the reproduction canton-maker confirmed that the wool would shrink—and of course, it needed to be kept at the original garrison-sized flag dimensions.

Okay, Plan B. We’d take it to a local drycleaners, well-regarded for its care of important objects owned by the diplomatic and government corps. That simple decision then required multiple interactions with our accounting staff: Is the cleaners in the federal payment system? Who writes the purchase order? Which fund? Who calls in the okay to use a particular government-issued charge card? Finally, all the proper paperwork was processed, and I volunteered to schlep the canton to and from the cleaners. Success! As per our instructions, the canton was cleaned and beautifully folded, ready to go back onstage.

But the process took quite a while and involved lots of people… It reminded me of a label in the exhibition, The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. In the section “So Others Might Fight,” there’s a quote: “For each infantryman in combat, ten other men—and women—in uniform provided support or supply services…” The text went on to include specific verbs—procured, transported, maintained the material and technologies—to wage war. It seemed appropriate that, while we weren’t waging war, there were at least ten—or more!—people working hard behind the scenes so the show, and the telling of the history, could go on.

Sue Walther is a programs coordinator at the National Museum of American History.

Security guard by day, actor by "Night (at the Museum)"

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m really excited to see the new movie Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian. I love my job (at the Smithsonian), I love history (which comes to life in the movie), and I love a good comedy.

When I shared my excitement with one of my fellow Smithsonian staff members, John Brown, it turned out that he has a few exciting connections to the movie. Here’s my interview with John:

In case you can’t tell, John and I had a blast filming this. And I was thrilled to have Oscar the Grouch as a co-star. Keep an eye out for Oscar in Night at the Museum 2, opening today! (Find out how to visit objects portrayed in the film.)

Jenny Wei is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.

Of Nobel Prizes and erector sets

In accepting his appointment as Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu became the first Nobel science laureate to serve in a cabinet position. His selection was also a first for a Chinese American scientist, the type of societal breakthrough we celebrate each May with Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Chu, one of the scientists featured in the Lemelson Center’s Nobel Prize centenary celebration, received the prize for an amazing piece of experimental manipulation that used laser light to cool or slow down the motions of atoms almost to a standstill. His Nobel citation linked this fundamental discovery to a range of applications, from more precise atomic clocks to atomic lasers and to nanotechnology.

No. 8 1/2 All-Electric Erector® Set.

Although Chu came from an academic family, he has a talent and an inclination for bridging pure and applied research, a talent that will be critical to his success as Secretary of Energy. In his Nobel acceptance remarks, he pointed out that these twin interests were ingrained since childhood. “Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d’être,” recalled Chu, echoing the family experiences of many high-achieving Asian Americans. At the same time, he noted, “by the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size. The living room rug was frequently littered with hundreds of metal ‘girders’ and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding half-finished structures.” I find it interesting that the latter quotation could have come from almost any inventor. Yet, in fact, this childhood fascination with mechanical toys and devices turns out to be typical of scientists as well, including those at the Nobel level.

Over the years, the Lemelson Center’s programs have presented and documented a number of Asian-Americans who, like Chu, bring basic scientific knowledge to the service of technology and humanity. Among those featured have been such Indian Americans as Akhil Madhani, an MIT student who invented a robot for heart surgery; Subhenda Guha, a participant in the Center’s Solar Shingle Challenge; and Ashok Gadgil, who developed his UV Waterworks purifier for use in his native India. Still other Asian Pacific American inventors are featured in the Museum’s exhibition, Science in American Life, Indian immigrant Vijaya Melnick, an expert in urban public health; Chinese immigrant physicist S.B. Woo, who also served as Lieutenant Governor of Delaware; and the Shanghai-born nuclear physicist Chien-Sung Wu, who worked on the Manhattan Project and helped revise some of the fundamental laws of physics. These individuals make it clear that American science and technology have benefited immensely from the contributions of Asian Pacific Americans.

Art Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History.

Unlocking a photography mystery

This year I’ll celebrate twenty years working at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, curating the history of photography collection. Started in the 1880s, it is the oldest collection of photography in an American museum, and includes many unique photography collections and related cameras. My current research project is the Hillotypes Collection, early examples of color photography made in the 1850s. Reverend Levi L. Hill worked as a daguerreotype photographer in the remote hamlet of West Kill, New York, in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, and experimented in making color images. The museum has the only set of Reverend Hill’s 62 early color experiments, originally donated in 1933 by Hill’s son-in-law.

With the help of research grants from both the Smithsonian and The Getty Foundation, these earliest of American color photographs have been analyzed by X-ray and infrared technology to determine whether Reverend Hill’s process was a true color process. This has been a huge controversy in the history of photography. In fact, an international competition of sorts was brewing in the mid-1900s to see which country’s photographer would invent the first commercial color photography process, France or the United States.

Little research on the photographs themselves has been done until now. Our current research shows Reverend Hill succeeded in making color photographs, but also hand-colored some with pigments and dyes to better his results. This Smithsonian collection is a truly experimental collection of the earliest color photographs made in America.

My research, and that of my grant colleagues, will continue. What I didn’t expect in the beginning of this research was to find out the Hill’s home in West Kill, New York, was just an hour or so away from where I grew up in Newburgh, New York. Reverend Hill was just one of many early New York photographers working from Manhattan to Albany, and west to the Catskills. There is a strong history of the beginning of American photography in this region. I intend to search it out.