O Say Can You See?

The Lemelson Center serves up food for tomorrow

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center is dedicated to the study of invention and innovation in the history of the United States. The challenge of fulfilling such a broad mandate is what makes the Lemelson Center such an exciting and dynamic hub of activity. It is our responsibility to explore invention and innovation through a wide array of subjects and topics. From the latest inventions in nanotechnology to the radical innovations found in skateboard culture—there are no subjects beyond our interest.

In all that we do, the Lemelson Center strives to live its mission: to be innovative. We are at our best when our scholarship and programming bring scholars, inventors, and other practitioners together with a broad range of audiences to explore the history of invention and innovation in new and exciting ways. Our recent Food for Tomorrow symposium, held at the National Museum of American History on November 5-6, 2010, provides a wonderful example of what can happen when the public joins together with scholars, innovators, and inventors in an open dialogue about the history of invention and where future innovations will lead us.

The two-day program, developed in collaboration with the museum’s Food and Wine History Project, encouraged participants to “eat, drink, . . . and learn” through the discovery of invention as part of our daily menu. Specifically, what role does invention and innovation play in what we eat and how we eat it—in the past and in the future?

Symposium events included a food truck muster at the museum featuring cupcakes, french fries, Korean tacos, salads, lobster rolls, and more!

The Food for Tomorrow program, (or menu, if you will) featured presentations by some of the nation’s leading scholars, inventors, writers, scientists, and molecular gastronomists who engaged the public audience—and each other—to think innovatively about the ways in which we produce, prepare, and consume our food. Lively discussions challenged all of us to consider how new innovations will shape these efforts in the future. As one might expect, there were stark differences of opinion about these critical issues but, significantly, many commented that the symposium served to make them consider these questions in new and different ways.

Public programming for the symposium included making hydroponic gardens in Spark!Lab with Resident Eccentric Steve Madewell.

It is important to the Lemelson Center to continue this dialogue about the future of food beyond the two-day symposium. In this spirit, the Lemelson Center will feature Food for Tomorrow as the central theme of its podcast series, Inventive Voices, throughout 2011. In this way, we will provide the opportunity for our symposium presenters to share their innovative insights and include you in the conversation. The Inventive Voices podcast series is available through the Lemelson Center’s website or may be downloaded from iTunes.

Attendees sample wines from innovative East Coast vineyards.

The symposium was launched with the film premier of Truck Farm!, a whimsical look at the true story of urban farms taking root in New York City. From a self-sustaining Staten Island barge to a 6,000-square-foot market garden atop a Brooklyn roof, these gardens are breathing new life into old cities. We were thrilled to have filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the Peabody Award-winning co-creators of King Corn, Big River, and The Greening of Southie, at the museum to discuss their newest film. The Lemelson Center is very pleased to feature Ian Cheney as our guest in our first podcast of this year’s series to share his unique perspective about the future of food with you.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis with their truck farm.

Listen to the podcast

 

Jeffrey Brodie is the deputy director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Build a better mousetrap

Legend has it that that Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” The Sage of Concord actually said, “If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.” Although Emerson was misquoted, his idea is powerful and enduring—so powerful, in fact, that the U.S. Patent Office has issued thousands of patents for mousetraps, more than any other machine.

Right now several mousetraps are on display in the artifact wall on the first floor of the museum. But why mousetraps? According to Bonnie Campbell Lilienfeld, Deputy Chair of the Division of Home and Community Life, “We chose them to represent technology because the drive to ‘build a better mousetrap’ symbolized to us the American drive to innovate.” Here are just a few of the ingenious devices Americans have devised over the years:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Can't see the slideshow above? Visit our Flickr set to see the mousetraps.

Have you ever invented something? What drives you to create new ideas? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Ben Miller is an intern with the New Media program at the National Museum of American History.

Made in America

Lincoln bust sold by Smithsonian store

Recently U.S. Senator Bernard Sanders from Vermont wrote to the museum and gently chastised us for selling small busts of the U.S. presidents. He wasn’t challenging the notion of a souvenir toy; rather he questioned why they were being made in China.

This raises a good question: what does it mean to be Made in America? As a curator who has spent a lifetime studying industrial history I often come across the popular belief that unemployment in the United States is a result of the trend towards offshore production.  In fact Americans have been buying foreign goods since the formation of the country. Trade as well as manufacturing location is historically important to the development of the nation.  In the late 1700s Americans actually bought a surprising amount from distant countries. Martha Washington owned a dress made from Chinese silk and in the 1830s an enterprising American company, Carnes Brothers, began to experiment in Chinese production of cheap novelties for the U.S. market.

Martha Washington’s dress from the early 1780s is made from silk taffeta woven and painted in China.

Years ago I co-curated an exhibition on sweatshops and in the show we asked our visitors to go to their closet, make a list of where the clothes were manufactured, and speculate on why. To help, we provided a table of labor rates from around the world. Of course, our challenge was somewhat of a trick question because there are so many invisible factors that identifying the real source of production is often difficult to ascertain.

As an example, for the manufacture of a simple tee shirt, the cotton may be grown in one country, but the tractor used to plow the field was likely manufactured elsewhere, and the fertilizer that made  the plants grow may come from yet a third. The raw cotton may be spun into thread in one location then woven into fabric and dyed elsewhere. The shirt pieces might be cut in one country, sewn in another, and finished and tagged in yet another location. Even if you can answer these questions you have to determine where the shirt was designed, who moved the goods, who marketed the product and sold the garment. Yikes! The list goes on almost endlessly. Pietra Rivoli has written an outstanding book, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, that explores this complex idea.

Card case made in China during the 1830s for the U.S. market

While it certainly is ironic that the national museum is selling models of the U.S. presidents made in another country, it isn’t very surprising. Today many products (especially low cost items like toys) are sourced in China. While the United States might lose the actual manufacturing work, the bulk of the profit often goes to American companies doing design, prototypes, and marketing. As a country, retaining the 50 cents of labor on a $10 item is less important than the $9.50 of indirect costs.

For historians another way of looking at the impact of business on the American experience is from the perspective of the consumer. Currently staff at the National Museum of American History are developing a new exhibition called American Enterprise. The show’s theme is an examination of the American marketplace - the dynamic interplay between consumers and producers. What a product costs is very important because it affects how many people will buy it. For about 100 years the United States has been the world’s largest economy and to a great extent it is because of our ongoing national beliefs in competition, innovation, opportunity, and stable rules. 

(Left) Smithsonian team visiting the Caterpillar plant in Decatur, Illinois. (Right) To honor their customers, Caterpillar flies a large group of international flags outside their Decatur plant.

In our research for American Enterprise we have been visiting factories and farms around the country. Last fall we toured the giant Caterpillar plant in Decatur, Illinois. There we saw highly trained workers using high tech equipment to make state of the art earth moving equipment. Many of the machines are exported to customers around the world, including China. As a nation we can’t make everything; given a choice I am pretty sure we would rather have Americans manufacturing earth movers and let the Chinese people make the toy models of our presidents. 

Peter Liebhold is Chair and Curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

Benedict Arnold: American history’s most heroic traitor

“Time Trial of Benedict Arnold,” the museum’s new theater program, opened on December 27 to rave reviews! The program explores the complexities of history by examining the case of Benedict Arnold, America’s best-known traitor.

But how does historical understanding develop over time? What happens between the facts of an historical event and the memories of history? And why do many people only know that Benedict Arnold was a traitor, while never hearing about his actions as a hero of the early Revolutionary War?

In “Time Trial of Benedict Arnold” the audience becomes the jury, hears Benedict Arnold’s side of the story, and deliberates on his contested legacy. Check out the video clip below to get a glimpse of our rehearsals, the show, and what people are saying about it. We hope you can make it to the museum to see the show, but if not, never fear, the Internet is here! In the next few months, we’ll be posting more information and a full video of the show. We also invite all the teachers out there to join the conversation about Benedict Arnold happening in the online teacher community run by our partner, Verizon Thinkfinity.

And Benedict Arnold is just the beginning! In the future, we’ll be putting other controversial historical figures on trial and asking visitors, “Why do we know what we know about history?”

“Time Trial of Benedict Arnold” runs Fridays and Saturdays at 11:00am, 1:00pm, 2:30pm, and 4:00pm through March.

Let us know what you think! What would you ask Benedict Arnold if you had the chance? Which other historical characters would you like to put on trial?

Susan Evans is a floor manager at the National Museum of American History.

Behind the scenes in the costume collection

Editor’s note: This essay by guest blogger and maker Allison Thurman is adapted with permission from the Center for the Future of Museums Blog.CFM is an initiative of the American Association of Museums that helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society, and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow. For more information on museums and the future, visit www.futureofmuseums.org.

I like to make things. I’m a looker and a doer, too—I visit museums, I fence (both historical and modern sport). But a big part of my time and enthusiasm goes into creating historically accurate clothing. Happily I’m not the only one, and have found a number of good groups of people in the SCA, Costume Society of America, and International Costumers Guild to brainstorm and play with.

This is no casual hobby. My vacation time is spent going to different academic conferences, like the Florence, Italy costume colloquium in 2008, and the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress. At these events museum curators, academics and amateurs share research and trade notes on various aspects of costume and textile history, from details of construction and design to histories of manufacture and trade. I’ve given over a significant portion of my modest apartment to fabric, sewing machine and storage for my creations. I have an extensive book collection and seek more obscure sources, like inventories, when needed for a particular project. Of course, the primary sources for a lot of my interests are locked up in museums and archives, in storage, not on public view. From my point of view, it’s great that this material exists in public institutions, but only if it can be accessed by the public!

Since my teen years I’ve been particularly fascinated by Mariano Fortuny’s pleated silk tea gowns. It’s not just the luxe, timeless look, but the mystery behind the pleating process that intrigued me—patent documents exist but aren’t entirely clear, and each gown had to be sent back to the Fortuny atelier in Venice for re-pleating every time it was cleaned.

Teagown by Mario Fortuny in the museum's collections.

Over the years I’ve read all of the readily available books on the designer, and have seen a few of the pleated gowns behind glass in museums but some of my questions regarding construction could only be answered by close examination inside and out. After discovering that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History had one tea gown, I decided to ask if I could visit behind the scenes to satisfy my curiosity.

I was a museum volunteer in the past and have visited museum storage spaces before, but this was the first time I’d ever made an appointment to handle a delicate item and I wasn’t sure they’d say yes. I’m not trained in museum studies nor do I have any “academic cred,” but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Finding who to ask was fairly easy. I looked up the dress on the museum's website, and browsed backwards to find the curator in charge of the department that held it. My email was fairly formal but concise, simply asking if I could make an appointment and including the catalog number of the dress (taken from the website) to ensure we both knew what I was talking about.

Once the curator said a visit was permitted, I went about scheduling (a month in advance) and asking specifically what kind of handling, if any, would be allowed. Sketchbook with pencil and a cloth measuring tape was permitted, as was supervised handling with cotton gloves. Photography was permitted as well, as long as it was for research only.

The day of the actual appointment I was a bit nervous, but the curator Nancy Davis was friendly and informal, which put me at ease. She asked me about my research as she took me to get my visitors pass.

She had pulled the dress in advance, laying it flat under tissue paper on a muslin-covered table in one of the costume storage rooms. It was accompanied by two other gowns that were also pleated and hence derived in style from Fortuny’s work. The curator had pulled them simply because she thought I might be interested!

Photo of lacing by Allison Thurman.

There is truly nothing like The Real Thing. I was able to learn a great deal about the light weight and “hand” of the silk even through cotton gloves, and examination of the inside neckline and seams revealed some of the coveted construction details. Even evidence of wear (frayed trim, faded, flattened sections) told a story about how the dress was worn and repaired—and when it wasn’t. Measurement of the tiny pleats suggested that the pleating was done by industrial processes, rather than by hand.

The visit created as many questions as answers. As the Smithsonian’s dress is sleeveless, I still don’t know how the sleeved gowns were formed—were they pleated and added before or after construction? How wide were the fabric sections unpleated?

I was deeply flattered that Dr. Davis took time out of her busy schedule not only to pull the Fortuny out of storage and meet with me, but took extra time to present other garments and ask me about my research. After my time with the gown, I was also given access to the “additional information” files that the Smithsonian keeps on each designer, and these gave me leads for future research in other institutions.

I recognize that no matter my enthusiasm for a subject, museum staff have more experience and knowledge of the history and context of their collections than I ever could.

Allison Thurman is a maker and doer in the D.C. metro area.