Natural Resources - Overview
The natural resources collections offer centuries of evidence about how Americans have used the bounty of the American continent and coastal waters. Artifacts related to flood control, dam construction, and irrigation illustrate the nation's attempts to manage the natural world. Oil-drilling, iron-mining, and steel-making artifacts show the connection between natural resources and industrial strength.
Forestry is represented by saws, axes, a smokejumper's suit, and many other objects. Hooks, nets, and other gear from New England fisheries of the late 1800s are among the fishing artifacts, as well as more recent acquisitions from the Pacific Northwest and Chesapeake Bay. Whaling artifacts include harpoons, lances, scrimshaw etchings in whalebone, and several paintings of a whaler's work at sea. The modern environmental movement has contributed buttons and other protest artifacts on issues from scenic rivers to biodiversity.
"Natural Resources - Overview" showing 2 items.
Oil-Wick Miner’s Lamp Patent Model
- Description (Brief)
- This oil-wick cap lamp is a patent model constructed by William C. Winfield of Hubbard, Ohio that received patent number 115,143 on May 23, 1871. Winfield’s claim in the patent filing is a miner's lamp with “a new article of manufacture, viz., a miner's lamp, provided with a screw-cap constructed, arranged, and operating with relation to the body of the lamp.”
- Location
- Currently not on view
- patent date
- 1871-05-23
- patentee
- Winfield, William C.
- ID Number
- AG*MHI-MN-9737
- accession number
- 088881
- catalog number
- MHI-MN-9737
- patent number
- 115143
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Oil-Wick Miner’s Lamp Patent Model
- Description (Brief)
- This oil-wick lamp is a patent model constructed by William C. Winfield of Hubbard, Ohio that received patent number 126,606 on May 7, 1872. The patent claims as its invention “securing the lid or cap of the ordinary ‘miners' lamp’ to its body through the medium of screw-threads in the cap and on the neck of the lamp, the cap being furnished with an elastic packing-disk, air-chamber, and openings for the ingress of air.”
- Location
- Currently not on view
- patent date
- 1872-05-07
- patentee
- Winfield, William C.
- ID Number
- AG*MHI-MN-9753
- catalog number
- MHI-MN-9753
- accession number
- 088881
- patent number
- 126606
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center