O Say Can You See?

Celebrate NanoDays in Spark!Lab

You never know what to expect when you head into the Lemelson Center’s Spark!Lab. Visitors might be learning about electricity through the experiments of Benjamin Franklin (and maybe receiving a little shock from Resident Eccentric Steve Madewell as I have on many occasions!), inventing their own robots in Invention Corner, watching our volunteers perform an experiment with dry ice, or even, once, building the world’s largest LEGO light bulb.

Resident Eccentric Steve helps these young visitors create their own liquid crystal displays.

But I can tell you what to expect this week (through Saturday, April 3)—lots of fun, hands-on activities about nanotechnology as Spark!Lab celebrates NanoDays! What’s nanotechnology you ask? I didn’t know either until Resident Eccentric Steve explained it to me. Nanotechnology is the study of controlling matter on an atomic and molecular scale and is used in a lot of things we use everyday like LCD screens on our cameras, phones, and TVs and has uses in robotics, health care, agriculture, and more.

The Lemelson Center is one of more than 200 science museums, research centers, and universities across the country presenting hands-on activities, experiments, and lectures pertaining to nanotechnology. Come into Spark!Lab this week and learn about nano by building a giant model of a carbon nanotube out of balloons measuring your height in nanometers, inventing your own NanoBot, or creating a liquid crystal display that changes color.

There’s even a nano-activity that involves your sense of smell! The innovative minds down in Spark!Lab have put essential oils inside a bunch of balloons they then blew up. Because the balloons have nano-sized pores, they both stay inflated and let off delicious smells like peppermint (my favorite), licorice, and coffee—which all the adults responded to with “MMMMM!” while all the kids went “YUCK!” Stop by and let me know in the comments which ones you liked!

 

Left: These inventors just patented their NanoBots at Spark!Lab’s patent office. Right: Giant balloon model of a nanotube in progress.

On Saturday, April 3, we’ll have nanotechnology experts from places like The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies giving special presentations. For more information on special guests, including our Innovative Lives program with Michael Furher and a forum on the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, visit the Lemelson Center’s website.

Kate Wiley is the communications assistant for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. She is 1,730,000,000 nanometers tall.

A celebration of teaching and learning

A railroad spike…A 45 RPM record adapter…Baleen as long as my arm… Our netbook… And a whole bunch of handouts.

We were ready to head to New York City for our teacher workshop!

As a member of the Thinkfinity.org consortium, we were invited to present a teacher workshop at the WNET Celebration of Teaching and Learning in New York City. Working with teachers has always been one of my favorite aspects of museum education, since every teacher we reach can impact the lives of hundreds of students.

We’ve done a few webinars in the past, but this would be my first in-person workshop in a while. Would the teachers ask questions I couldn’t answer? Would we have enough handouts? Would anyone be interested in a workshop with a ridiculously long title like “Real Stories, Real Stuff: Online Resources from the Smithsonian and Teaching Social Studies with Objects?” No. No. And YES!

Teachers, curriculum specialists, and administrators filled our workshop to the brim!

We had a standing-room-only crowd at the workshop, and we had so many attendees that even with 25 extra sets of handouts, some folks had to share. And in return, the teachers shared their wonderful enthusiasm throughout the session.

With the rail spike, 45 adapter, and baleen, we made the points that objects can be the starting points for a wide range of topics, objects are compelling, and they can help get people thinking creatively about big questions. And with the hundreds of activities and primary sources we have online, we can help teachers excite their students about history learning whether they live in Oregon, Florida, or right here in DC.

It was exciting to hear the sounds of confirmation from the crowd, and how they planned to add our primary sources or activities to the lessons they already teach. Several teachers also volunteered to help with future resources by reviewing or “test-driving” them with their students before we published them.

The presenters took a breather and quick photo after the workshop.

I’m sure this all sounds like a terrible tease for teachers who weren’t part of the magic that early Friday morning, but much of what we discussed is already online, as part of the “teacher’s page” on Smithsonian’s History Explorer. Check the teacher’s page for frequent updates, highlighted resources, tips for teaching with objects, and polls that will help shape our upcoming projects.

Jenny Wei is an education specialist who loves teaching and learning… online, in person, at museums, in classrooms, and with learners of all ages. She copresented will Carrie Kotcho (education technologist) and Heather Paisley-Jones (education specialist).

Happy anniversary, lasers!

Science? Not really my thing. It’s not that I don’t appreciate science, I just don’t happen to be blessed with the aptitude for it. This is why I wasn’t quite sure what to think when I found myself a part of the team working on the new case exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. Prior to working on this case, my knowledge of lasers was pretty limited to the laser pointers used in my college classrooms, the little red spot that magically reads music in my CD player, and the midnight showing of the Pink Floyd laser show I went to when I was 16. Like I said, I’m no scientist.

Fictional ray guns on the cover of the August 1927 Amazing Stories

However, what I learned in the ensuing months working with Hal Wallace, a knowledgeable curator in the Division of Work and Industry, surprised me. First of all, the story of the invention of the laser is far from the snoozer I may have initially imagined it to be. It turns out the race to invent the first working laser was, in fact, a race—complete with competing teams, controversial winners, accusations, and ongoing debate. Pretty common themes in the world of invention.

Secondly, despite my initial intimidation, laser technology is not beyond the layman’s understanding. Two objects in our case that I particularly like are the two “amateur” lasers. These lasers weren’t built in fancy labs by researchers with PhDs. One was built in a guy’s basement and another was built in 1964 from instructions found in an issue of Scientific American. I love that that this kind of technology can be reproduced by regular people. In fact, after a quick review of basic physics, even I had a pretty good grasp of how lasers work.

Ebe Helm built this carbon-dioxide laser in his parents’ basement in 1978

The third surprising thing I learned about lasers is that my limited prior knowledge of lasers as everyday “stuff” is part of the beauty of laser technology. The first laser inventors would probably have been shocked to think that their high powered, cutting edge technology would one day be so seamlessly incorporated into everyday life. How could they have known that in the 50 years following the invention of the first successful laser, lasers would be used in the most advanced ways – like Lasik eye surgery, as well as the most mundane ways – like a $3.00 cat toy. Today we use lasers on the job for precision measuring and cutting, in clinics for removing unwanted hair, at the grocery store to check out groceries, and in our homes to listen to music and watch movies. Laser technology has revolutionized the way we work and play. And what’s particularly surprising is that the technology is so good, most of us aren’t even aware of it.

While the 50th anniversary of the first laser isn’t technically until May, I just want to say, happy anniversary; may the next 50 years be as surprisingly innovative as the first.

5 more surprising things I bet you didn’t know about lasers:

1. The word “laser” is actually an acronym. It stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which is also a tidy little definition—if you can figure out what it means.
2. The concept behind lasers was first theorized by Albert Einstein in 1917—43 years before the first working laser!
3. Laser-like weapons such as “death rays” existed in the public imagination and science fiction well before lasers were actually invented. Interestingly, despite advances in laser technology, portable lasers devices that can directly destroy a target continue to be a thing of fiction—for now.  It’s no coincidence that “phasers,” the signature weapons in the 1960s (and beyond) tv show Star Trek, sounds so much like “lasers.”
4. More than 55,000 patents involving the laser have been issued in the United States.
5. The patent litigation over lasers lasted over 30 years. It doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see the drama bubbling over in that story.

 

 

Elisabeth Johnson is a special assistant for public programs at the National Museum of American History. She freely admits that Laser Floyd at the Hansen Planetarium rocked her 16 year old world.

Remarkable New Jersey!

The cover of The Daily Graphic of New York, 9 July 1879, pronounced Edison a “wizard.” SI negative #80-18655

New Jersey, or at least that part of it nearest New York City, has a long history as a technological region, born out of Thomas Edison’s laboratories, the prototypes of all industrial research labs. They thrived with Edison at the helm for almost fifty years. When we think of the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” we think of electric lighting, the phonograph, the stock ticker, and other groundbreaking inventions that resulted from what were arguably Edison’s most fertile years. We seldom realize that his first and most famous “invention factory” in Menlo Park (now part of Edison Township), which opened in 1876, existed for a relatively short time.

Quickly outgrowing this first lab, Edison moved to New York City in 1881 and stopped working at Menlo Park late in 1882 (and even though he and his wife Mary continued to use their Menlo Park home during the summer, he turned his back on Menlo Park completely in 1884, distraught over Mary’s premature death at the age of twenty-nine). Fortunately, Edison had the resources to overcome psychological, financial, and other obstacles, and the Edison laboratories grew to even grander proportions in West Orange, New Jersey.

After Edison abandoned Menlo Park, the complex deteriorated rapidly. When in the 1920s Henry Ford wanted to honor his good friend Thomas Edison by moving the Menlo Park complex lock, stock, and barrel to Dearborn, Michigan, and the new Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, he found almost nothing to preserve and ended up re-creating some of the original buildings. Today, a tower topped with a giant lightbulb stands on the Menlo Park site and Edison’s West Orange lab is preserved as a historic site. But Edison’s labs left a rich legacy, not only for New Jersey but for the world.

Edison and Francis Jehl reenacted the evacuation of an experimental lightbulb during the dedication ceremonies of the re-created Menlo Park lab at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1929. SI negative #87-1732.

Like inventors themselves, research laboratories seem to have a finite life span, at least in terms of their periods of peak productivity. When we polled a group of historians and other experts on this as part of the Lemelson Center’s “Places of Invention” project, the consensus was a maximum period of about 20 years, a phenomenon repeated in New Jersey (and elsewhere) at places including Bell Labs and RCA. Accounting for this longevity, or lack thereof, is no simple task, but it has something to do with the complex chemistry between people and place. Questioning what resources exist, how long they last, what the competition for them is, and given those factors, how long the institution’s way of operating can be maintained, can shed light on the underlying causes of this pattern.

Arthur Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

A teacher's perspective on the Greensboro Sit-In Youth Town Hall

Editor’s note: This post was written by Amy Trenkle, a middle school teacher in Washington, D.C. She and her students—along with 200 other young participants—were invited to attend a program at the museum in which the three surviving members of the Greensboro Four were interviewed about their bold action that ignited student involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Students from Amy Trenkle's middle-school class, Franklin McCain (left), and Joseph McNeil (right) had a chance to meet and pose for photos in front of the lunch counter on display in the museum.

I was so excited to learn that my students and I were invited to the Youth Town Hall: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Greensboro Sit In. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to have my students attend! My challenge was a) how to narrow it down to select students and b) how to prepare them for this great opportunity!

I decided to open up the opportunity to any student who was interested and asked them to write me a letter as to why they would like to attend.

 CJ wrote, “I really would like to go on this trip because I see myself always wanting to do what is right for others and to be able to feel what they felt . . . will be an experience I will not forget.” He continues: “My love for history and understanding the importance of why people do what they do because they believe in it is another reason I want to attend this trip. I think that the context of my last two History Day projects, on Julius Hobson Sr. and Congressman John Lewis, is even more of a reason I need to attend this trip. The background information I gained from both projects helped me understand the time period and the importance of why the four young men and other students like them made a statement by sitting in for what was right.”

Another student, Diani, wrote: “Those four African-American men began a movement to end segregation in a non-violent way. This is a good opportunity for people of all races to be able to listen to the stories of the victims of segregation.”

I had a group of interested students!

Preparing the students

I quickly realized that many of my students didn’t know about the Greensboro sit-in. My first step was to visit the museum’s Web site and view the teacher resources. I found the background guide helpful. In our literacy class we took a period to read what the sit-ins were about. It gave the students an opportunity to understand the historical context as well as to ask questions. We had a candid discussion about where Greensboro is, why the sit-in was significant and then linked them to the D.C. scene. Many of my students have heard of Mary Church Terrell but were unaware of her important role in desegregating lunch counters and restaurants here in Washington.

While we didn’t use the video segments the museum provided in its teacher resource pack, I think it could have been helpful and may be something that I integrate as an activity for all my students later this month.

The big event!

On the day of the event we left from school quickly and headed to Union Station for lunch and then to catch the subway. My students were very excited about the event. We rushed in, with just a few minutes to spare. While they were some of the youngest participants there, they were incredibly attentive and respectful.

Jocelyn came prepared with written questions. When it was time to take questions from the audience she was quick to share. When the microphones were set up in the aisle Cyvon, Norman, and Charles joined her. I was astonished and proud. As a teacher it’s always exciting to see your students participate and be engaged in the material—and to feel comfortable enough to want to ask a question in front of their peers!

 

Amy Trenkle's middle-school class shared these two photos of their trip to the museum. Left: Students at the Youth Town Hall. Right: Students, Franklin McCain (left), and Joseph McNeil (right) pose in front of the lunch counter on display in the museum.

The highlight for my students came at the end of the town hall session when we were escorted upstairs and allowed to take a picture at the Woolworth lunch counter with two members of the Greensboro Four. Jocelyn was so excited and proud to get their signatures on her typed list of questions.

Discussion after the event

The ride home was full of chatter about the event. My students were excited to meet living history! They really were interested in what they had witnessed. As a follow up I encouraged my students to blog about their experience. Below are some of the reactions from the students:

Courtney wrote, “This event in Greensboro is just a small part of what is known as the Civil Rights Movement. I think that children all over the world can learn about the Civil Rights Movement and how it has affected America. I think any child can learn that the Civil Rights Movement was not as vicious as it is portrayed to be and I also think any child can learn that the Civil Rights Movement showed the world that America can and will overcome any obstacle within itself or around the world. Most of all I think all children should learn and know that the Civil Rights Movement shows that there is no race in the world. Overall by attending the 50th Anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-In I would say this was a great program because I learned more about the Civil Rights Movement and I got to attend a once in a life time event. The best part of the day was when I got to get all of the participants of the Greensboro four (that were in attendance) to sign their autographs for me. This was one of the best class of 2010 field trips so, if you did attend then I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and if you didn’t attend then you should have come!!!!!!”

Cyvon wrote, “From this experience I learned to work hard, get an education, and stay focused. I think students of today can learn from students in the civil rights movement about courage. This was the best opportunity in my life.”

Rachel summarized our event by writing, “I had a great time listening to the three men talk about what they where thinking when they planned to do the sit-in. Also they told us how an old lady had come up to them, put her hand on one of the guy’s shoulders then said what took you so long to stand up for your rights in this place then she had walked away and left the store. The guys taught me a lot such as when the security did not know what to do when he saw them sitting because he couldn’t do anything because they were not bothering anyone. Also I learned that they closed the store early because of them, and lastly I learned that they did the sit-in more than one time until others started to join in. My opinion of the story is that they went through a non-violent protest and no one could do any thing about it so I think that the men were very brave and they had never backed down not even once.”

 

As a teacher, I think whenever students have a chance to interact with the pages of history, a new pathway is forged. These type of experiences open gateways for students and encourage them not to be passive readers of history but to be engaged in the world around them. It also encourages them to think about the impact that not only one person can make, but what a difference they can make in their own community and for larger movements.

Amy Trenkle is a social studies teacher in DC Public Schools and an adjunct professor at American University.