O Say Can You See?

Moving Beyond Earth: Innovations in Space

Editor's note: Listen to Matthew Hersch discuss the history behind the development of the space suit. From early high altitude suits, to women’s foundation garments and depictions in popular culture, Hersch covers the amazing story behind one of space exploration’s most important inventions.

This weekend, November 18 and 19, the National Air and Space Museum hosts the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation’s 2011 New Perspectives on Invention and Innovation symposium. This year, it promises to be a stimulating and exciting time as we ponder Moving Beyond Earth: Innovations in Space.

1981, The Space Shuttle program begins with the launch of Columbia, STS-1. Courtesy of NASA.

The task of this gathering is to consider the nature of invention and innovation in space. We, in general, have the belief that the technologies used to engage in spaceflight are by definition innovative. This may be true at some level, but the relationships between technological innovation; various space institutions; innovative concepts, practices, or organizations; and the people associated with each are intrinsically complex. Essentially nonlinear, these relationships allow innovation to take place, no doubt, but there does not seem to be a way to guarantee it. Those who seek to command innovation find that changes in inputs to various aspects of the systems, themselves designed to yield innovative alterations, do not necessarily ensure proportionate positive developments in output. It is non-linearity writ large.

1998, International Space Station begins operations. Photo courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.

I find such discussions invigorating, and the symposium promises to bring together a range of thinkers about the subject to explore various aspect of space-technology innovation. Engineers such as Larry Williams of SpaceX, Haym Benaroya from Rutgers University, and Pablo de León from the University of North Dakota will offer discussions of some of the vexing questions we have about reaching into space and living and working there once we go there to stay. Historians such as Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum, Amy Foster of the University of Central Florida, and Matthew Hersch of the University of Pennsylvania unravel the complexity of past space efforts to help illuminate the present. And such policy leaders as scientist and astronaut Tom Jones and American University professor Howard McCurdy chart the course of future endeavors to reach beyond this planet to the larger cosmos.

1926, Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket. Photo courtesy of NASA.

These are just a few of the highlights of the symposium; it promises to be a rousing time, with keen observations and provocative perspectives on the past, present, and future of humanity of space. A full list of symposium sessions and times is available on the Lemelson Center’s website. Come one, come all!

Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Podcast: The Future of Food

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series to accompany Inventive Voices podcasts from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. In this post, Project Curator Amanda Murray elaborates on themes related to a new podcast featuring Warren Belasco, an American Studies professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a founder of the academic food studies movement. Listen to the podcast to discover how past generations viewed the "future of food."

Dippin' Dots. Photo by Flickr user TheKarenD.

If you've been to a Six Flags theme park in the past few years, you've probably seen it: Dippin' Dots, "Ice Cream of the Future." Maybe you sampled the Alien Vanilla Crunch flavor with "top-secret chocolate coated space rocks." When these ice cream pellets were invented in 1987, the "future" was probably somewhere around today, but no matter—it can be postponed. "Ice Cream of the Future" is just a slogan for an odd, amusing treat, and as you inch closer in line to the next death-defying Six Flags roller coaster ride, it probably seems just fine that the future, at least the Dippin' Dots future, may never actually arrive.

Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food by Warren Belasco, interviewed in this month’s podcast. Courtesy of University of California Press.

But when it comes to questions about the real future of food—where it will come from and whether there will be enough for the entire world—people are more serious, more anxious, and many are devising inventive solutions. In fact, we're not the first generation to experience this mix of anxiety and optimism abut the food we eat. What have feelings about the future of food looked like in the past?

In this month's Inventive Voices podcast, Warren Belasco, a pioneer of the academic food studies movement, explores a history of the future of food and explains how futuristic visions of what we eat appear in everything from economic theory to science fiction films to policy debates around genetic engineering. Some mid-century sci-fi depictions of "runaway technology"—mad chemistry, nuclear rays, and robots gone awry—even seem prescient of today's genetically-modified Frankenfoods and heavily industrialized agriculture.

One of Warren's interests (and mine) that didn't make it into the podcast is modern, futuristic kitchens presented at world's fairs, especially during the 1930s. Throughout this tumultuous decade, world's fairs across the country encouraged Americans to imagine a more hopeful future in which better-designed goods would enable a life of greater convenience, comfort, and security.

Promotional poster for Chicago’s 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

World's fairs brought modernist design out of art galleries and into visions of everyday life. Fairs promised that the kitchen of the future would be as sleek and efficient as a new Ford. Common to all the 1930s world's fairs were model homes, such as Chicago's House of Tomorrow, showing off the latest innovative building technologies, architectural styles, and home furnishings. As electrification spread beyond urban centers and as Americans consumed more processed, packaged foods, world’s fair model homes emphasized "labor-saving" electric appliances, laboratory-like sanitation, and standardization for cooking—and less and less interaction with the food itself.

Fast forward to 1964, considered the "future" if you lived in 1933. In a campy Frigidaire marketing film, a woman visiting the 1964 New York World’s Fair encounters "imaginative design and new concepts from the far corners of the world" as she teleports magically from one modern kitchen to another (each as abundant with ethnic stereotypes as with electric appliances). As the viewer flies over model forests and model cities, a narrator explains that "[i]n and around great cities like this, will live many of the people of the future, a future of limitless hope and promise, and nowhere will this be more evident to the homemaker than in the kitchen of the future." What are we to make, then, of today's high-end consumers who want a rustic farmhouse table from Pottery Barn to go with their sub-zero refrigerator and dual-fuel, self-cleaning, electronic-controlled Viking Range?

Kitchen in the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company’s House of Glass at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Title of photograph: World’s Fair, House of Glass no. 4. Kitchen. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As Warren notes in this podcast, there is a tendency to over-credit technological innovation and change in providing all the solutions we need, and ours is not the first era to see reactions against over-modernized food (he calls this reaction the "countercuisine") and over-modernized society in general.

We are likely to find that many futures of food can coexist. When faced with questions like how to regain control over the origins of our food or how to produce enough for everyone, we can produce diverse and creative solutions that use ideas from different economic theories and different farming practices, from a mix of high and low technology, and from where we've been and what we've seen before.

Amanda Murray is a project curator for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and produces the Inventive Voices podcast.

Podcast: What’s “universal” about universal design?

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series to accompany Inventive Voices podcasts from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. In this post, Curator Katherine Ott elaborates on themes related to a new podcast featuring Bess Williamson, Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Delaware. Listen to the podcast to find out what Julia Child’s kitchen (and a variety of gadgets) can teach us about accessibility and innovative design.

A common motivator for invention and innovation is immediate physical need. Embedded in human nature is the desire to do a task more easily, more beautifully, faster, or just differently. In the history of disability, the best solutions often have arisen from the creative minds of the people with the most at stake. J. E. Hanger lost a limb in the Civil War and started a prosthesis company. Van Philips was dissatisfied with the artificial feet available to him and designed the Flex-Foot and the “cheetah leg.” Marilyn Hamilton wanted to continue to play tennis after a sky-diving accident and the result was the Quickie wheelchair.

(Left) The Quickie, one of several brands of sports wheelchairs, helped popularize wheelchair tennis. Marilyn Hamilton used this chair to win the 1983 U.S. Women’s Open Wheelchair Tennis Championships. (Right) This Flex-Foot from the late 1990s was designed by inventor Van Phillips. This foot is designed for the average wearer, not athletes. It includes a heel and a shock absorber on the shaft.

Universal design originated in a similar way. In the 1960s, a loose-knit group of activists, designers, architects, and educators who shared a common belief in the right of all persons to use public space and participate in civic life, began to find one another and discuss inclusion strategies for people with disabilities. Over the next twenty years, they formulated an approach to product and environmental design that wedded civil rights with bodies that are not typically abled. This hybrid aesthetic—variously known as universal design, trans-generational design, design for all, and life span design—is evident in everything from levered door handles, curb cuts, large-button telephones, automatic water fountains, and ramps, to the ergonomics of computer keyboards. In this month’s Inventive Voices podcast from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Bess Williamson, a Ph.D. candidate in the history of American civilization, describes the design principles behind the iconic Cuisinart food processor and other kitchen tools, as well as living spaces aimed at “aging in place.”

Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian

Universal design rejects traditional “separate but equal” facilities for people with disabilities. The original principles of universal design grew out of a 1974-77 Department of Education grant to architect Ron Mace that involved extensive product and architectural analysis. That lead to a working group to develop core principles for universally-designed facilities, which would provide for equitable and flexible use; be simple and intuitive; present perceptible and sensory information; tolerate error; entail minimal physical effort; and be of an accessible size and orientation. Mace used a wheelchair as a result of contracting polio when he was a boy. His early engineering and design talent resulted in numerous gadgets and adaptations and eventually a career in dismantling architectural barriers.

Other aspects of universal design emerged from the efforts of 20th century designers who approached their work in terms of social justice and political action. In the 1930s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfus designed products for human-centered functionality. Norman Bel Geddes consciously saw his work as designing for social progress. More recently, Donald Norman, emphasizing human-centered design that reflects ease of use and “democratic” access, designed for Apple Computer and Hewlett Packard. Although these industrial designers did not have a disability consciousness, they understood the act of designing as a political act with an end goal of social inclusion.

How does universal design affect your daily life?

Katherine Ott is Curator in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.

Mary Lou Williams: Musical and social change agent

Portrait of Mary Lou Williams, CBS studio, New York, N.Y., ca. April 1947. Courtesy of William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

Mary Lou Williams was a jazz artist who articulated the history, culture, and heritage of a people and a nation through the music she composed and performed. An All About Jazz article by writer Teri Harllee highlights Ms. Williams as the only major jazz artist whose career spanned every musical era in jazz history. As shown by our collections, we have examples of her boogie woogie music as well as later compositions that were arranged for big bands, including “Scorpio,” which she arranged for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1946.

Listen to the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra perform this piece on Public Radio International’s “Jazz Smithsonian” program, which originally aired on May 23, 2000.

 

PLAY: Scorpio

Her vision and jazz experience is succinctly captured in the Jazz Tree that Ms. Williams created with artist David Stone Martin in 1977. At the root of the tree is “Suffering” born of the slave trade and resulting legacies of slavery. The Blues frames the outer trunk. Spirituals, Ragtime, Kansas City Swing and Bop rise inside the tree trunk, and jazz luminaries sprout from the leaves like a bushy afro. The tree creates a jazz timeline that illuminates a musical genealogy of the African American experience in America.

This experience is also reflected in The Kinsey Collection, on view at the museum through May 1, and the slave shackles from the popular culture film Roots. Sheet music, contemporary to Ms. William’s early career, contained examples of stereotypical views of African Americans in popular culture, sometimes degraded by themselves: “Mammie’s Pickaninny Boy” and “All Coons Look a Alike to Me”.

Fr. Peter O’Brien, Society of Jesus, was Ms. Williams’ last business manager and continues to direct the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, where her musical and cultural legacy is extended through education programs. Recently Fr. O’Brien’s reflections on Mary Lou Williams appeared in a Smithsonian Folkways article, and in 1994, he participated in the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Program where he discussed Ms. Williams and her impact on his life.

A catalyst for cultural understanding and transformation

According to Dr. Billy Taylor, the late jazz educator, composer, and musician, Mary Lou Williams remarked that “If we are to make progress in modern music, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments." In 1996, Dr. Taylor presented a bold, new idea to the Kennedy Center: let’s launch a Women in Jazz festival honoring Mary Lou Williams. The response was, “Will there be enough women to perform at the event?” No problem, Dr. Taylor assured skeptics.

Held every May at the Kennedy Center, the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival is an annual, seminal event presenting workshops and performances by veteran and emerging jazz women. These vocalists and instrumentalists pay tribute to an artist that most believe to be the greatest jazz woman who ever lived, and many, past and present, view her gender as irrelevant to her accomplishments. In the Joan Burke documentary on Mary Lou Williams, saxophonist Buddy Tate noted: “She was outplaying all those men. She didn’t think so but they thought so.”

In Ms. Williams’ later years, she became a teacher at Duke University, which also saw her legacy and creativity as emblematic of its social and educational changes. On March 8, 1961, Duke’s board of trustees announced that students would be admitted to its graduate and professional schools without regard to race, creed or national origin. Three African American students enrolled that September in the law and divinity schools.

The policy was extended to the undergraduate school about a year later and in September of 1963 the first black undergraduates were admitted. Civil rights advocacy lead to admission changes but Mary Lou Williams and jazz were selected to brand Duke’s new center for black history and intercultural engagement that emerged later.

The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture was established in 1983, six years after Ms. Williams became the university’s first-ever “artist-in residence,” a position she held until her death in 1981. The Center promotes racial understanding, community building, and appreciation of the black experience in America by increasing and presenting knowledge about African American people, history, culture, and contributions of the African diaspora. Programs developed by the Center include regular jazz performances featuring local and guest jazz artists and students from the Duke University Jazz Studies Program; exhibitions such as “Women of the Blues”; and recognition of black achievement such as contemporary black inventors.

Through the Center, jazz and Mary Lou Williams are instruments of domestic cultural diplomacy and inclusion.

Have a listen

Check out a a podcast and teacher guide from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s Executive Producer, Ken Kimery.

Mary Lou Williams recorded extensively for Folkways Records, and Smithsonian Folkways re-issued many of those recordings in recent years. In addition, a rare big-band rendition of “Virgo” from her “Zodiac Suite” is one of several Williams contributions included on Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology. Hear a rehearsal of “Little Joe” by Mary Lou Williams and the Chosen Five, from the 1950 Folkways album Footnotes to Jazz, Vol. 3, Rehearsal, I.

Listen Here to "Little Joe"

Joann Stevens is Program Director for Jazz Appreciation Month at the National Museum of American History.

Editor's Note: This year's Jazz Appreciation Month poster features Mary Lou Williams. The graceful portrait of Ms. Williams was developed for JAM by Keith Henry Brown, a young African American artist with a passion for jazz and a legacy as the former Creative Art Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center. To request a copy of the poster, write jazz@si.edu. Or, you can download it here it in PDF format.

Squishy gunk in tubes

Squishy gunk in tubes. This space food package in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum contains pureed beef with vegetables and was issued to John Glenn for consumption during his Friendship 7 flight in February 1962.

One morning, shortly after the school day started, my classmates and I gathered around my school’s small black-and-white television to view history in the making. It was May 5, 1961, and I remember being transfixed by a grainy, darting image of the Freedom 7 capsule carrying Alan Shepard, the first American in space, back home to Earth. I was in the first grade and like a lot of kids of my generation, I decided right then that becoming an astronaut would be the coolest thing EVER.

Except for the food. In those early days, it seemed like an astronaut’s diet consisted primarily of squishy gray gunk in tubes. Yuck.

Over the years, Hollywood and television have given us an evolving vision of dining in space. Still-squishy gunk is served in elegant trays by stylish flight attendants in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). At the beginning of Alien (1979), the crew enjoys a normal breakfast spread of cereals, biscuits, corn bread, fruit, and coffee—in one of the last normal moments of the film. And then there’s the foodie ultimate—the replicator aboard the USS Enterprise that conjures “Earl Grey, hot,” at Captain Picard’s command in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).

Left: A Star Trek thermos, perfect for taking your “Earl Grey, hot” with you. Right: No one on board the Nostromo suggested making an omelette out of these! Ripley (aka Sigourney Weaver) was on hand when this prop from Alien was donated to the museum.

But what do real astronauts eat? Well, among other things, hot sauce, according to NASA food scientist Vickie Kloeris, who is interviewed in the latest Prototype Online: Inventive Voices podcast from the Lemelson Center. Kloeris explains that many astronauts experience a diminished sense of taste (and smell, an important component of taste) while on orbit, and something with a bit of a kick provides a welcome wake-up call to the taste buds. So it’s not a surprise that horseradish-laden shrimp cocktail ranks first as American astronauts’ favorite space food.

Developing a mouthwatering menu for microgravity, however, involves more than dishing up the chili peppers. Processing and packaging directly affect things like taste and shelf life. Since there are no food refrigerators in space, Kloeris and her team are constantly innovating methods of food preparation that retain both flavor and nutrients as well as packaging that keeps the food appetizing even after months on the International Space Station (ISS). And if we ever make the trip to Mars, the food will need to stay tasty for about five years.

Beyond these practical considerations, Kloeris stresses the importance of the psychological role of food. Gathering for meals is an important part of the day for the men and women in space. And it’s even more satisfying if they can finish a meal with a warm dessert, something Kloeris and her team developed for the ISS.

NASA food scientist Vickie Kloeris points out that freeze-dried ice cream made one flight into space, on Apollo 7 in 1968, and hasn’t been back since. “It’s not an adult thing,” she says. See her list of the 10 Worst Space Foods.

OK, so the squishy gunk in tubes is gone and today’s astronauts are not eating freeze-dried ice cream washed down with a pouch of Tang. But how close is NASA to “Earl Grey, hot?” Though space food has come a long way, Kloeris says that Jean-Luc won’t “make it so” anytime soon. Seems that food is the real “final frontier.”

 

Listen to the podcast

 

Joyce Bedi is senior historian at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History.