O Say Can You See?

One word: Plastics

As you wander through a museum, do you ever wonder about the story behind a collection or object? How did something so intriguing or beautiful ever come into a donor's possession? Why did the donor part with it? These stories can be surprising, convoluted, and, on occasion, even incredible. If you're lucky enough to see the display of celluloid on the first floor of the museum, you'll see a collection with a particularly interesting story.

Celluloid game pieces.

Dadie and Norman Perlov, long-time residents of New York City, have always had the "collecting bug." Early in their life together, they acquired artifacts made of iron, but the objects tended to be large in size and began to overwhelm the apartment, which was soon being shared by their three young daughters. This prompted Dadie to look for an inexpensive collectible that could be handled by and would be of interest to her children. During the 1960s, she settled on celluloid, a new material developed by American inventor John Wesley Hyatt in 1869.

Considered the first semi-synthetic plastic, celluloid was invented to replace ivory in billiard balls, but it proved unsuitable for the purpose. This sent its inventor to look for other applications. Because celluloid could be made to imitate expensive or rare materials—such as ivory, tortoiseshell, and mother-of-pearl—it was soon employed in the manufacture of fancy goods affordable for the growing middle class. As celluloid became more plentiful and inexpensive, its applications expanded, and by the 1880s, it was everywhere. To provide just a few examples, it was used to make post cards, game pieces, toys, advertising novelties and souvenirs, jewelry, knitting needles, straight razor handles, and  imitation linen collars and cuffs. (To learn more about celluloid and other historical plastics, check out the Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center.)

Celluloid brooches and pins.

It turns out that Dadie made an excellent choice of material. Daughters Nancy, Jane, and Amy enthusiastically joined their parents on collecting trips, visiting flea markets, antique stores, and rummage sales in the United States and abroad. Dealers and store owners came to know Dadie and her daughters, and would set aside celluloid items to display later for the Perlovs. By the 1970s and 1980s, celluoid-collecting had become an obsession, fueled by the Perlovs' increasing knowledge of the material's history and their appreciation of celluloid's impact on society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (An interesting aside: one of the books they read was Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of Celluloid [1983] by Robert Friedel, who began working on the book while he was a Fellow at the National Museum of American History.)

Dadie and Norman Perlov in front of the celluloid exhibit at the museum.

By the time the Perlovs stopped amassing celluloid in the late 1980s, the collection numbered 7,500 pieces. This is where the National Museum of American History comes in. Since her girls were grown and had families of their own, Dadie decided it was time to downsize her collection. She wanted to share it with the American people, so who better to give it to than the Smithsonian Institution!

In 2006 I received a letter from Dadie, offering her marvelous celluloid collection to the museum. I told her I'd be happy to travel to New York City to take a look at the collection, and my colleague Eric Jentsch and I wound up making three trips over the course of several months. During our second trip, we spent three days in the Perlov apartment. We took over the living room, unpacking box after box so we could examine, photograph, and list every item.

The author in the Perlovs' apartment, about to unwrap celluloid artifacts for examination.

Celluloid objects spread out on a table in the Perlovs’ living room.

In the end, we collected 1,755 pieces. You might ask how we selected fewer than 2,000 objects out of over 7,000. Well, it certainly wasn't easy! We tried to collect examples of each type of artifact, but in the case of the post cards and advertising materials, we collected all the pieces that were available and in good condition. I probably shouldn't admit this, but once I was there and looking at all of the wonderful objects, I stopped thinking about whether I had enough storage space—I just figured I'd find the space afterward, and luckily, I did.

Ann Seeger is Curator of Chemistry in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.

Speaking out about HIV/AIDS, one button at a time

Editor's Note: This is the fifth post in a series exploring the 30th anniversary of HIV and AIDS. Beginning last June 3, the National Museum of American History has been marking the anniversary of the emergence of the HIV and AIDS epidemic with a three-part display and companion website. This blog series provides additional context through the perspectives of people directly involved in the history the museum is documenting.

Miguel Gomez, wearing the AIDS vigil button, stands before his board of buttons.

Miguel Gomez is the director of AIDS.gov, a program of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that works to increase HIV testing and care among people most at risk for, or living with, the disease. In his office in Washington, D.C., Gomez has a bulletin board showcasing an amazing collection of buttons from projects and events related to the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Buttons are an efficient means for documenting history because they distill complex messages into concise language and graphics, and capture diverse points of view (the National Museum of American History has over 33,000 pin-backs in its collection). We asked Gomez to elaborate on his button collection—and here's what he had to say.

—

If inanimate objects could speak, the buttons on the bulletin board in my office would tell many stories. Each button has only a few words or a single image to "speak" to those who stop to take a look. But, if you care to listen, these small pieces of metal and plastic tell tales of nearly unbearable sorrow—as well as stories of courage and hope.

Buttons used to do what Twitter does now: share with the world, in a very few characters, an important message about the person who displays or wears them. You might call them low-tech "micro-tweets."

I have collected buttons since I was a child. I think I got my first one at the Detroit Auto Show in 1970; it featured an image of the brand-new AMC Gremlin. Over the years, I collected others. I still have one from my first trip to Washington, D.C. for a march. But the bulk of my collection is made up of the buttons I have collected over the 30 years of the HIV and AIDS epidemic.

I have over 500 buttons, and all of them are meaningful in some way or another—but the one that memorializes an early AIDS vigil is my favorite. The button is black with white lettering. It says "National AIDS Vigil, October 8, 1983" and shows a hand holding a candle, which makes up the "I" in "AIDS."

AIDS vigil button, 1983.

At that time, we still didn't know what caused AIDS. It would be another year before HIV was identified as the cause of so much suffering and death, and many more years before treatments were available. All we knew then was that people we loved and cared for—friends, family members, co-workers—were dying.

Soon after that vigil took place, I came to Washington, D.C. to begin working at an organization that advocated for Latino issues, but they didn't want to address the issue of HIV and AIDS then. The stigma was too great. I am convinced that stigma kept us from responding quickly enough to the epidemic—and caused untold losses that might have been prevented.

The button encapsulates that history for me. It continues to be a stark reminder of how much HIV and AIDS has cost us. When I look at it, memories of the friends and colleagues I have lost to AIDS come flooding in—and I am reminded that approximately 18,000 people still die of the disease in the United States each year.

Miguel Gomez, 1984.

That button continues to inspire me in my work at AIDS.gov every day.

Other buttons remind me of events that have been important in the history of HIV and AIDS in the United States and the world. There are buttons from ACT UP rallies, which pushed the U.S. government to respond more rapidly and effectively to the epidemic here at home. There are buttons from multiple International AIDS Conferences, where I have met with thousands of people from around the globe who are responding to HIV and AIDS or living with the infection.

The buttons are of different colors, shapes, and sizes. They reflect multiple languages, perspectives, and goals.

But they share one, overarching message: we must respond to the HIV and AIDS epidemic, and we must do so in ways that honor those we have lost and protect those who are living with the disease now.

A button may not reach as many people as a tweet—but I would say it performs pretty effective "messaging" for something that can fit in the palm of your hand.

Shortcuts across time and space

Chromolithograph, from about 1893, of Columbus bidding farewell to the queen of Spain on his departure for the New World in 1492. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

With the rising cost of fuel and the impossible demands on our time these days, we are constantly looking for shortcuts. That puts us in the company of history's most famous seeker of shortcuts, Christopher Columbus, who sailed west to reap the bounties of Asia. Key to his audacious plan to reach the "Indies" was the spherical shape of Earth, which, contrary to insidious schoolbook myth, almost everyone at the time accepted (some 350 years after Columbus, belief in a flat Earth began to resurface, as seen in the 1884 foundation of the United Zetetic Society, antecedent of today's Flat Earth Society). Had Columbus not seriously underestimated Earth's size, he might have made it to his true destination. Instead, his accidental landfall on the present San Salvador Island (now part of the Bahamas) introduced his fellow Old Worlders to the wonders of what they called the New World. The Genoese explorer's serendipitous encounter fed an ever-growing fad for discovery—and an ever-growing need to know where you were headed.

The National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum are jointly developing the exhibition Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, which will feature navigation instruments from clocks used in 17th-century seafaring to the latest Global Positioning System (GPS). Though Columbus had only a limited acquaintance with celestial navigation, celestial is what it's all about in the modern age of space exploration, the newest and most outrageous frontier. I am as concerned as any of my fellow earthlings about where we go post-Apollo and after the impending demise of the space shuttle. Though there is talk of traveling to Mars and even the moon again, I have yet to hear a definitive plan from NASA or anyone else.

An astrolabe, from about 1450, designed for an observer standing at the latitude of London. It has 25 star pointers shaped like heads of dogs, with a grid of lines below for setting star positions.

In the meantime, why think so small? Far more exotic worlds beckon: new planets, star systems, galaxies, and even parallel universes. And it's not just science fiction writers who are thinking this way. Intergalactic space and time travel has also become a fashionable topic among some very respectable scientific thinkers, including Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Michio Kaku. They admit this is the ultimate scientific and engineering challenge to navigation. Without shortcuts, you can't even think of trying "to boldly go where no man has gone before," as Star Trek intoned. Even allowing for the discovery of a revolutionary form of rocket propulsion, there is the absolute ban on exceeding the velocity of light—a speed limit policed by none other than Albert Einstein with his theory of relativity—which one must do to traverse cosmic distances in anything less than a ridiculous amount of time.

Yet it was Einstein who also suggested some theoretical loopholes—what are now called wormholes, those tunnels between two points in space-time (also made popular by Star Trek)—based on the curvature of space-time posited in his general theory of relativity. In 1935, with his student Nathan Rosen, he explored warps in the fabric of space-time that offered possible shortcuts. The Einstein-Rosen bridge shortcut involves black holes. As Kaku explains it, "At the center of a black hole, there is a 'throat' that connects space-time to another universe or another point in our universe." That's the magical shortcut. But, how do you navigate a wormhole? According to Einstein and Rosen, you can't, because it closes fatally before you and your spaceship can squeeze through.

This hypothetical spacecraft with a "negative energy" induction ring was inspired by recent theories describing how space could be warped with negative energy to produce hyperfast transport to reach distant star systems. Digital art by Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp.), 1998. Courtesy of NASA.

There the matter stood for quite a while, until in 1988 physicist Kip Thorne and colleagues at CalTech found a solution to Einstein's equations that kept the portal open long enough to allow safe passage. Ordinary matter and energy, according to relativity theory, give space a positive curvature, like the surface of a sphere. While that was a useful shape for Columbus, it is a problem for navigating wormholes, posing an impenetrable "singularity" (a point where space-time curvature becomes infinite). Thorne and his team introduced the idea of an extremely rare form of matter with "negative energy density," which they theorized curved space in the opposite direction and thus kept the wormhole open for traversing not only our universe, but between ours and other universes. "Negative energy" seems to exist theoretically, although it is exceptionally hard to obtain, even in the minutest quantities.

Long a skeptic of such things, Stephen Hawking has lately come around to giving the concept of navigating wormholes his tentative blessing, though he still insists that time travel can only go in one direction, toward the future and not the past. More precisely, his position is that it is "theoretically possible," which of course is not at all the same as saying you can actually do it.

I confess to being utterly fascinated by the fascination that physicists like Hawking and Thorne have with cosmic and intercosmic travel. But what does it all mean? The imagination should soar; yet at the same time I appreciate the dose of reality in Kaku's statement that "While Thorne's time machine seems theoretically possible, [it is] exceedingly difficult to build from an engineering viewpoint." A magnificent understatement, to say the least. Then again, if Columbus didn't have a dream (or had had his global dimensions right), would he ever have dared to venture forth?

Art Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. This column originally appeared in June 2011 issue of Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

Searching for Anna Lowell: The mystery behind a Civil War nurse's photo album

Editor’s Note: This is the third post in a series featuring additional context about "So Much Need of Service": The Diary of a Civil War Nurse, a joint exhibition with the National Library of Medicine that documents the experiences of those who contributed to the Civil War effort, such as nurses Amanda Akin and Anna Lowell.

Anna Lowell, in Washington, D.C., around 1863. Courtesy of Carol Bundy.

A couple of months ago, I went for a walk here in Washington, D.C. My destination was 1228 N Street NW, just two blocks south of Logan Circle. My mission was to stand before the building described in a Washington Post article as a "plain three-story brick house ... with a lawn of velvety grass [and] the words 'School of Cookery'" lettered on the western façade. But when I arrived at my destination and saw instead a hulking apartment building and no lawn, I realized that wishful thinking—or, rather, the relentless passage of time and perhaps even demolition cranes—had gotten the better of me.

In fact, the aforementioned Post article is dated May 3, 1896. The quaint house at 1228 N Street and the School of Cookery no longer exist. In 1906, the school’s founder Anna Woodbury (née Lowell) died in her home several blocks from the school at 1319 Massachusetts Avenue—another house that I later confirmed on the same walk is no more.

Presentation page of Anna Lowell Photographic Album, 1864. Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

I've been drawn to Anna Lowell and inspired to take walks like this in search of her story after encountering an artifact from her life that, unlike the School of Cookery, still exists. At the National Library of Medicine, one can view a photographic album  presented to Lowell in 1864 by a group of attendants in D.C.'s Armory Square Hospital. In 1862, having recently been trained as a nurse, Lowell had traveled from Cambridge to D.C. and immediately gotten to work. Lowell—niece of the famous poet and critic James Russell Lowell—initially served as a nurse on a hospital ship, the Daniel Webster, and, for the remainder of the Civil War, volunteered in Ward K of the Armory Square Hospital.

George Custer, around 1864. Courtesy of Anna Lowell Photographic Album, 45c, National Library of Medicine.

I have had the good fortune of spending some time with Lowell's album. I enjoy showing the album's lovely inscription to groups touring the NLM’s historical collections. Photograph albums were common gifts among people during the period, and in Lowell's, one finds 142 cartes de visite (card photographs), including scenes from the Civil War, images of monuments, and portraits of individuals ranging from military figures like General George Custer to royalty like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. All of the photographs in Lowell's album are available for view in the NLM's Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) database (to have a look at them, click here).

You can now view the album in person at the National Museum of American History, where it is currently on display in an exhibit about Lowell's fellow nurse in Armory Square Hospital, Amanda Akin. In addition to her work as a nurse in Ward K, Lowell was in charge of the hospital's special diet kitchen. (Take a moment to read about Akin's run-ins with Lowell about special diets in Akin's published memoirs; see page 240, for example.) The museum's joint exhibition with the National Library of Medicine features issues of the hospital's newspaper, Armory Square Hospital Gazette, whose final issue, dated August 21, 1865, lists the hospital nurses, including Lowell. While Akin left the hospital before the end of the war, Lowell stayed until the institution closed in the summer of 1865.

Why did the Ward K attendants, in the midst of a war, gift Lowell with a photographic album? I wondered, was it her birthday? Was it a farewell gift?

Anna Lowell, seated, with fellow nurse Miss Low, a niece of New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale and a volunteer in Ward I. Washington D.C., circa 1863. Courtesy of Carol Bundy.

With a little sleuthing, I came upon what I believe to be the answer. I discovered that both of Lowell's brothers, James Jackson Lowell and Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., died in service during the war, in 1862 and on October 20, 1864, respectively. Anna learned of Charles' death two days after, directly from General Custer, another brigade leader at the Battle of Cedar Creek where Charles had been mortally wounded. Anna met with Custer at Secretary of State Edwin Stanton's offices, where she had gone in search of news about her brother.

Brig. Gen. Charles R. Lowell, around 1864. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Armory Square Hospital could not spare Anna Lowell, even in her grief, and she could not attend her brother’s funeral in Cambridge with the rest of her family. Charles' death was announced in the October 29, 1864 issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette (Anna is not mentioned). I re-checked the date the album was presented to Anna Lowell, November 24, 1864, and it all clicked. The album—and the photograph of Custer, in particular—all at once took on a new light for me. I no longer view the album as a random gift; rather, I see it as a moving tribute and a kind gesture made in light of the personal loss borne by Lowell as she stayed in the overwhelmed Armory Square Hospital wards, with the rest of her family mourning in Cambridge.

Following the war, Lowell married a prominent D.C. physician, Henry E. Woodbury, but the marriage quickly soured. Dedicating herself to charity work, she founded in 1879 the first mission school of cooking, which included among its students African Americans—a fact that piqued my interest in Lowell. She later published a cooking manual that would be used in D.C. public schools. Lowell's obituaries in the Washington Post and the New York Times extol both her work as a nurse during the war and the school she worked tirelessly to maintain and develop.

I didn't need to venture out and walk very far, after all, to get a deep sense of Anna Lowell's story. That's the beauty of historical artifacts and the many powerful stories they can tell us when we let them to speak for themselves.

Dever Powell is Rare Book and Early Manuscript Librarian at the National Library of Medicine.

Scenes from the Hurly Burly Hotel: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War

Louisa May Alcott. Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

“As no two persons see the same thing with the same eyes, my view of hospital life must be taken through my glass, and held for what it is worth.” – Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches

Before performing preliminary research on Civil War-era nursing for the National Library of Medicine’s joint exhibition with the National Museum of American History, I knew little about the hard-working and dedicated women who served in overcrowded hospitals and on war-torn battlefields. Of all the women I read about, the only name that seemed familiar to me was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. It was not until I read the diary of Amanda Akin, the subject of the aforementioned exhibit, that another name caught my attention: Louisa May Alcott.

Georgetown’s Union Hotel. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

While Alcott is perhaps best known as the author of the 19th-century classic Little Women, she also served as a Union nurse in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown’s Union Hotel Hospital from December 13, 1862 to January 21, 1863. Though Alcott’s term of service was cut short after she contracted typhoid pneumonia, she used her brief wartime experience as a basis for her second published book, Hospital Sketches. Yet unlike many Civil War nurses who waited until after the war to publish their memoirs, Alcott’s appeared in print in 1863 before the war’s end, allowing fellow nurses such as Amanda Akin to read passages from the book to their patients. In The Lady Nurse of Ward E, Akin wrote in an entry labeled December 1863 that she “read aloud a chapter from Miss Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches,” which seemed to entertain a number very much, particularly my sensible John . . . who said he did not see where such an interesting book came from.”

First edition of Hospital Sketches (1863). Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

Hospital Sketches, though partially fictionalized, offers an interesting perspective into the life of a Civil War nurse, especially when compared to Akin’s memoir—and not simply because the two women served for different lengths of time (Alcott for two months, Akin for fifteen). They both served in Washington, D.C., but in two completely different hospital settings. The three-story Union Hotel Hospital in which Alcott performed her duties, for example, had poor ventilation, damp cellars, and no provisions for bathing; conversely, the ten, single-story wards composing the Armory Square Hospital where Akin labored not only allowed for light and air, but also facilitated the containment of infectious disease.

When Alcott visited Armory Square during her stay in Washington, she could not help but compare the well-maintained and well-managed hospital residing on the National Mall to her own, which she refers to as the “Hurly burly Hotel” in her work: “Here [at Armory Square], order, method, common sense and liberality reigned and ruled, in a style that did one’s heart good to see; at the Hurly burly Hotel, disorder, discomfort, bad management, and no visible head, reduced things to a condition which I despair of describing.”

One of Amanda Akin’s personal diaries. Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

Like Akin’s diary, Alcott’s account provides us with a fascinating, personalized portrayal of what it meant to be a female nurse in a world in which male physicians were still unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with working alongside women. For this reason and many others, both texts prove to be incredibly valuable resources for scholars and the public alike. At the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, visitors are welcome to explore a first edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches as well as one of Amanda Akin’s personal diaries (currently on display at the National Museum of American History until July 29, 2011).

Kevin Konrad is a graduate from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and an exhibition researcher.