O Say Can You See?

Digging into the museum's collections

Editor's note: This post is the third of three submitted by students as part of a Museum Studies class co-taught by Shari Stout, collection manager in the Division of Work and Industry. The class, which took place in storerooms at the National Museum of American History during the Fall 2011 semester, provided hands-on experience with issues relating to the rehousing and storage of onsite collections.

I must be losing my mind! Why would I leave a successful 30-year career in information technology to start a new career in the museum field? The face across the lobby stared back at me with no expression; I guess he was wondering too. Of course he couldn’t hear me. Standing behind glass doors, he had a permanent view of everyone coming and going. I shouldn’t be offended though. I walked up to him, nodded, and I thought he might have winked at me. Yes, I’m sure he smiled too. That was all the validation I needed.

Indeed, C-3PO [now off display] still looked sharp after his intergalactic adventures--and it was then I realized that I was exactly where I needed to be after all: the lobby of one of the coolest places in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History! Now, it’s time to get upstairs to my directed research class. I am pursuing a graduate certificate in Museum Studies at The George Washington University. Jim Carroll, Aspiring Museologist--has a nice ring to it! I gave a thumbs-up to C-3PO and headed to the elevator.

I didn’t know a lot about what I’d be working on, but there were two other students in the course with me, and the next 14 weeks or so would be new and exciting, for sure. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was about to become somewhat of an expert on a German model plow collection from the 1860s. This was intriguing!

The storage room where we met was filled with an eclectic (yet well organized) assortment of objects: shoes, mining safety lamps, old spears and weapons, a “beer paraphernalia collection,” and, of course, the model plows I would be working with. Stashed away in several old cabinets in a dim corner of this treasure trove room, I wondered--as I took my first close look at the collection--how they came to be here, where they stopped along the way, and why they were considered important. I mean, they’re just plows, right?

Part of the Rau Model Plow Collection, before rehousing project

The collection came to the U.S. National Museum (the predecessor of the current Smithsonian museums) back in 1910, transferred from the Department of the Interior. I learned that there are at least three collections of these 1/8-scale models, each containing hundreds of plows. They were made at the Royal Agricultural College of Hohenheim, Germany in the 1860s, under the supervision of Dr. Ludwig von Rau. Some of the models were on display at the 1867 Paris Exhibition. Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell University, obtained one set in 1868. There is a second set on display in Hohenheim; and the Smithsonian has a third set. The collection is important because it illustrates the development of plows throughout history, from as far back as 3000 B.C.E. The plows are constructed primarily of wood and metal, and are exquisitely detailed and historically accurate.

Sample model plow after rehousing

There are two primary objectives for this directed research project: (1) submit a proposed rehousing document, identifying existing risks and ways to mitigate them; and (2) implement some of my recommendations during the semester. This may include: replacing old foam drawer liners with new material which will help cushion the plows; constructing custom Ethafoam fittings for some of the plows that have very sharp metal edges; and making custom boxes for several plows which are damaged. These actions will help protect them while in storage. As there are a large number of plows in a very confined storage area today, I will use an adjacent cabinet to off-load several of the plows; this will allow more appropriate spacing of plows within each drawer. Finally, I will inventory all plows in one of the storage cabinets.

For me this isn’t tedious work, it’s important for the museum, and it’s fun! So, I must not be losing my mind after all. I’m living a dream, wouldn’t you agree?

Jim Carroll is a Museum Studies student at The George Washington University.

Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Editor’s note: This blog is the second of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

There is always something new waiting to be discovered at the Smithsonian, whether it is an artifact, a recorded sound, or an overlooked story.

Over the past two years, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Peter Alyea at the Library of Congress have partnered with the National Museum of American History to coax sound recordings dating to the 1880s into telling (and singing!) their stories. The recovered recordings are the Volta Laboratory Associates’ early experiments at recording and even reproducing live sound. These recordings were made in Washington, D.C., by Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. In some ways, the inventors anticipated the modern music industry. They experimented with reproduction and copying techniques for possible mass-consumption of their discs, and, unlike Edison’s phonograph cylinders, the Volta records were durable enough to be played multiple times.

Some of the Volta recordings were on wax mounted to pasteboard, a material similar to the covers of a hard-back book. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

Over 130 years after the Volta group sealed some of these recordings in tin boxes and deposited them in a vault at the Smithsonian, the Volta objects in the museum’s Work and Industry collection have been given back their voice. On Tuesday, December 13, 2011, the recordings were played publicly for the first time.

The sound recovery project has inspired others to look more closely at the Volta collection. Lemelson Center Fellow Patrick Feaster has been examining the museum’s experimental recordings to prepare a discography.

Patrick Feaster examines and photographs the early sound collection for his discography project. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

As Dr. Feaster worked with our collection of about 400 objects this fall, a handful of previously uncatalogued, virtually unknown Volta artifacts surfaced. About forty of these early recordings had stayed off the radar because they had never been assigned proper catalog numbers. This is highly unusual from a modern collections management point of view; today, new objects are almost immediately assigned unique numbers upon their entry into the collection. But for some reason, this had not happened to these discs. Though well taken care of, they had become a bit of a Smithsonian mystery. We’ve been able to listen to a few of the discs, but what else could they bring to light?

Early sound recordings have been stored at the Smithsonian for decades. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

My task was to examine and number these records to finally give them an official home within the larger Smithsonian numbering system. I gently inspected discs made of everything from copper (now chipping due to age) to cardboard to fragmenting plaster. Some discs had bits of foil imbedded in the wax coating the pasteboard, and others had notes etched into them by Bell and his associates. I found other strange, square-shaped objects that turned out to be impressions of recordings intended to be used for mass-reproduction.

These early recording prototypes would be abandoned in the late 1880s in favor of Volta’s wax cylinders, which were used for dictation and stenographic office work as late as the 1930s. But physically interacting with the Volta inventors’ initial creative thought processes was a privilege, and I was fascinated with the idea that these delicate discs have so much to tell and are now getting the chance.

The discs in the collection were made using a variety of metals, paper, wax, and foil. Photo by Christine Klepper.

So far, the voices on these previously unplayable discs remain unidentified. The next step for the recordings will be to recover and analyze those formerly silent voices. As the project moves forward, it is likely that we will be able to clearly identify Alexander Graham Bell himself.

Hear the Volta Labs Recordings, 1880-1885

PART 1: Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Annie Dobberteen is an intern in the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

 

Preserving plastics

Editor’s note: This post is the second of three submitted by students as part of a Museum Studies class co-taught by Shari Stout, Collection Manager in the Division of Work and Industry. The class, which took place in storerooms at the National Museum of American History during the Fall 2011 semester, provided hands-on experience with issues relating to the rehousing and storage of onsite collections.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! This familiar phrase says a lot about how we think about plastics today. For many of us, the imperative to recycle is caught up with our ideas about plastics and their permanence. Who hasn’t felt a little twinge of guilt at the thought of their unrecycled soda bottle sitting stubbornly in a landfill for hundreds of years?

It might seem strange, then, to realize that the preservation of plastics is actually a big challenge for museums. Unlike stone, wood, and metal, which have been used by humans for hundreds of years, most varieties of plastic were developed within the last century, meaning we still have much to learn about their long-term stability. Although we tend to think plastics will last forever, I bet you can think of plastic items in your own life that have shown signs of degradation—a clear plastic folder that becomes yellow with age or a vinyl toy that got sticky and tacky in a humid space, for instance.

As a graduate student in Museum Studies at The George Washington University, I have become fascinated by plastics history and problems of plastics preservation, particularly after spending the past summer working with one of the museum’s largest collections of plastic objects—the Perlov collection of celluloid. This semester, I jumped at the chance to work with a lesser known collection, the Fessenden collection of natural specimens preserved in plastic.

Working for the United States Department of Agriculture in the 1940s, Dr. George R. Fessenden must have seen plastics as permanent in the same way many of us do today. He developed two techniques to preserve plant and animal specimens in plastic, methods he hoped would help them retain their bright colors indefinitely. At the time, this was such a triumph that the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Museum put on an exhibit about the miraculous technological development. Visitors marveled at five-year-old roses that looked like they were picked the day before and tiny minnows that seemed to have been plucked directly from a stream.

Newspaper clipping from The Washington Star Pictorial Magazine covering the Fessenden exhibit.

Over time, however, the technique has proven not to have been as timeless as once thought. The kind of plastics Fessenden used made all the difference—one method encased specimens in methyl methacrylate, a relatively stable plastic. The other used cellulose acetate, a kind of plastic we now know tends to degrade and yellow over time. Although all of these samples have been kept in the same conditions over the past sixty years, the different ways in which they have aged and degraded is useful visual study in itself.

An array of Fessenden specimens as they look today

These visible changes aren’t the only ones happening, however. By using A-D test strips, a kind of paper that turns from blue to green to yellow in the presence of airborne acids, it is possible to see that the cellulose acetate specimens are releasing acidic vapors as they degrade. Vapors like this can be harmful to other objects in the museum, so decisions will have to be made about how to isolate these dangerous plastics from the rest of the collections.

Slices of potato in cellulose acetate. At one time, plastic would have been clear. The green A-D test strip above was kept in a bag with the object for one week; the blue strip is an unused A-D test strip for color comparison. Green color indicates that the object is unstable and releasing acidic vapor.

Mosquitoes and mosquito larvae preserved in methyl methacrylate have aged very well and look nearly identical to images taken of the object from the late 1940s. Notice that the lower A-D test strip, which was kept in a bag with the object for a week, has changed only very slightly in color, indicating a fairly stable plastic with minimal off-gassing.

While there’s no way to completely halt deterioration once it has started, there are steps we can take to slow the process. Part of my work this semester has been to remove objects from the old envelopes they were stored in and place them in stable blueboard trays, which I made specifically to allow for better airflow around objects. Regular paper, like that used in envelopes, tends to release acid over time, which increases damage to the objects. What’s more, the enclosed environment of a sealed envelope traps any acidic vapors released by the object, creating a microclimate that will speed degradation. By storing Fessenden’s collection in well-ventilated, archival trays, acidic vapors are able to disperse, thus lengthening the life of the objects.

Objects in new, stackable trays for ventilation.

Solutions to these and other issues concerning the preservation and storage of plastic objects are an important part of ongoing research here at the Smithsonian, a fact driven home by the creation of the Institution-wide Age of Plastics consortium in 2010. As a future museum professional and someone with a now admittedly geeky obsession with plastics issues, working with the Fessenden collection at the museum has been a wonderful chance to expand my knowledge about plastics, their “permanence,” and the challenges of their preservation.

Mallory Warner is a Museum Studies student at The George Washington University.

 

Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Editor’s note: This blog is the first part of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

Until recently, the oldest recorded sounds of known date which anyone could hear had been captured in 1888 on the “perfected” phonograph introduced that year by Thomas Edison. But Edison had invented his original phonograph eleven years before that, in 1877—and recorded sound itself is even older. In the 1850s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville of Paris created the phonautograph, an instrument which scratched records of aerial sound waves on soot-blackened paper, not for playback, but for visual study. This left a big disparity between when sound was first recorded (around 1857) and the earliest recorded sounds we could actually listen to (1888).

That changed in 2008 when FirstSounds.org released a sound file created from a phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” as sung on April 9, 1860. Suddenly we could hear more distantly into the past than ever before.

Even so, the intervening history of recorded sound—including the transformation by American inventors of the phonautograph into a “talking machine”—has remained frustratingly silent. The indented tinfoil sheets produced by Edison’s exhibition phonographs of 1877-78 weren’t regarded as permanently playable recordings, and little care was taken to preserve them in a playable state. No intelligible sound recovered from a historical tinfoil recording has ever been published.

Patrick Feaster working with the collections. Photo by Carlene Stephens.

So what else exists from before 1888? If we exclude recordings that weren’t intended for playback or to be permanently playable, then the oldest sound recordings preserved today are found at the National Museum of American History—experimental phonograms made starting in 1881 by the Volta Laboratory Association, which consisted of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, scientific instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter, and chemist Chichester A. Bell.

With the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship and the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I carried out a study of early sound recordings at the Museum, including the Volta materials, between October and December 2011. By comparing artifacts from the Volta collection with experiments described in notebooks at the Museum and the Library of Congress, I was able to identify a number of unlabeled items. One of these—a small copper disc with a laterally modulated or “zig-zag” sound recording—turned out to have been prepared shortly before October 20, 1881, to test whether electrically depositing a layer of metal on a recorded wax disc, and then using the metal negative to stamp out copies, might work as a basis for duplication in a future recording industry. “In this way a piece of music, for instance, can be recorded once,” Tainter had speculated, “and any number of copies made from this original record, and the music reproduced from each of the copies.”

Copper negative of a recording made in October 1881. National Museum of American History, catalog number 312,119. Photo by Patrick Feaster.

The October 1881 date makes this one of the oldest known American sound recordings in existence, so a question naturally arises: What’s on it? The written documentation I could find identifies the disc’s content only vaguely as “words and sounds … shouted into the mouth-piece,” but the Volta group’s notebooks reveal the general kind of test recitation they were then using, as for example:

July 4, 1881: “Several trilled R’s—then—‘Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.’—Several trilled R’s—then—‘How is that for high’—trilled R’s—and—One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—”

July 9, 1881: “There was a girl named O’Brian / Whose feet were like those of Orion, / To the circus she would go, / To see the great show, / And scratch the left ear of the lion. Trilled R’s. – ‘How is that for high’ more trilled R’s.”

Apart from the recurring expression “How is that for high”—roughly equivalent in 1881 to “How do you like them apples”—the most striking common denominator here is the “trilled R’s.” From laboratory notes, I could tell that this sound had recorded unusually well, and that the Volta group had often inserted it at beginnings, ends, and section breaks. But I didn’t know quite what it had sounded like. After all, nobody alive today had ever heard any of these experiments.

Charles Sumner Tainter’s drawing of the apparatus that recorded the original wax discs used in the duplication experiments of October 1881. Charles Sumner Tainter Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Photo by Patrick Feaster

In December 2011, Dr. Carl Haber unveiled the first sounds extracted from Volta recordings using an optical scanning technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress. One of the items chosen for this pilot project was the copper disc from October 1881. So now, at last, we can hear, across a gulf of 130 years: Trilled R’s—one, two, three, four, five, six—trilled R’s.

PART 2: Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Dr. Patrick Feaster is an instructor in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a Lemelson Center Fellow. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

 

A fascination with shoes

Editor’s note: This post is the first of three submitted by students as part of a Museum Studies class co-taught by Shari Stout, Collection Manager in the Division of Work and Industry. The class, which took place in storerooms at the National Museum of American History during the Fall 2011 semester, provided hands-on experience with issues relating to the rehousing and storage of onsite collections.

Visitors to the National Museum of American History are probably not surprised by the presence of the Star-Spangled Banner or Dorothy’s ruby slippers since these objects are easily recognizable as part of American history. Yet the objects on display at the museum are just a small part of the museum’s vast collection. I have had the incredible opportunity to view and work with some of these unseen objects as a museum intern and also as a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University.

Japanese sandals from the Frank G. Carpenter Collection. This shows an example of rehousing using a custom-made box with foam divider.

Museum methods and practices have evolved over time, and this includes methods for storing objects. The museum world now has a better understanding of conservation methods and this in turn has led to the creation of storage cabinets that are not only space-efficient, but also safeguard objects from potential damage and hazards (dust, light, pollutants, etc.). Rehousing can involve purchasing these higher quality storage units, creating custom-made boxes for objects, or simply reorganizing drawers and cabinets to produce additional storage space. The goal of rehousing is to create a more efficient, durable manner of storing the objects than the previous solution. Each student has identified a group of objects to rehouse. I have chosen to work with a number of objects that I first thought were out of place in the collection of an American history museum: shoes with a foreign origin—specifically, from Japan, the Philippines, and Syria.

These objects are held by the division of Work and Industry, and the presence of international shoes in a collection ranging from barbed wire patent models to early Edison light bulbs seems baffling without the proper context. The objects are part of the Frank G. Carpenter collection; researching a bit about the man who collected these shoes has shed some light on their presence in the museum’s permanent collection. While the shoes at first appear unrelated to American history, the man who collected them is most certainly part of this history.

Frank G. Carpenter

Frank G. Carpenter was a photographer, author, and world traveler in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Carpenter wrote a number of geography textbooks that were used in classrooms throughout the country. The Library of Congress possesses over 5,000 photographs that illustrate Carpenter’s writings on travel and world geography. These photographs and Carpenter’s world travels played a role in the popularization of cultural anthropology and geography in early 20th century America. While Carpenter’s photographs document his travels, the collection offers a rare insight into a man who apparently was quite fascinated with shoes.

Carpenter could have collected anything from his travels, but something about shoes captured his interest. Perhaps he found that shoes were easy to store and ship back home. Or Carpenter may have collected the shoes because the variations in style and design demonstrated the differences between the many cultures he came in contact with. Or maybe he found that the use of footwear common across cultures transcends the differences in the structure and function of the shoes, making them worthy of collecting. Frank G. Carpenter’s motivation for collecting shoes throughout his travels will likely remain unknown, but why these foreign shoes are part of the museum’s collection is no longer so mysterious.

Amanda K. Browe is a Museum Studies student at The George Washington University.