Science & Mathematics - Overview
The Museum's collections hold thousands of objects related to chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and other sciences. Instruments range from early American telescopes to lasers. Rare glassware and other artifacts from the laboratory of Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, are among the scientific treasures here. A Gilbert chemistry set of about 1937 and other objects testify to the pleasures of amateur science. Artifacts also help illuminate the social and political history of biology and the roles of women and minorities in science.
The mathematics collection holds artifacts from slide rules and flash cards to code-breaking equipment. More than 1,000 models demonstrate some of the problems and principles of mathematics, and 80 abstract paintings by illustrator and cartoonist Crockett Johnson show his visual interpretations of mathematical theorems.
"Science & Mathematics - Overview" showing 1385 items.
Page 118 of 139
Plain Dividers Retailed by Keuffel & Esser
- Description
- These plain dividers have grooved brass legs with steel points and are held together with a screw. Two small holes are in the joint on either side of the bottom end of the screw. The instrument arrived at the Smithsonian in a case (now lost) marked: Keuffel & Esser Co., New York. The dividers are similar to the 4-1/2" plain dividers from Switzerland advertised (without a case) in James Queen's 1883 catalog for $1.50. The instrument slightly resembles 4-1/4" plain dividers from France sold by K&E in the 1880s and 1890s for between 24 and 85 cents. It is not depicted in K&E's 1909 and 1936 catalogs.
- References: James W. Queen & Co., Priced and Illustrated Catalogue of Mathematical Instruments (Philadelphia, 1883), 22; Catalogue and Price-List of Keuffel & Esser Co., 23rd ed. (New York, 1892), 62, 102; Trade Price List. An Annex to the General Catalogue (Twenty-Eighth Edition) of Keuffel & Esser Co. (New York, n.d.), 30.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- late 19th century
- ID Number
- MA*335341
- accession number
- 305958
- catalog number
- 335341
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
SCM Marchant Adding Machine Experimental Model
- Description
- This is a model for a ten-key printing electric adding machine, most probably made at or for SCM Marchant. It has a metal mechanism (there is no case), nine gray round plastic digit keys arranged in a block, and darker gray 0 and total keys. There are seven additional key stems as well as three double key stems for bars. None of these have covers. Behind the number keys is an 11.5 cm. carriage for the paper tape, as well as a 2-colored ribbon. At the back left is an electric motor that would fit in the case, were there a case.
- The number keys are marked: 7 8 9 (/) 4 5 6 (/) 1 2 3 (/) 0.
- There is a black plastic cover.
- This machine has some similarity to the adding machine sold by Marchant around 1959, in the shape of the keys and placement of the function keys and print mechanism. However, it is considerably wider.
- Reference:
- SCM Collection (1979.3084.128).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1959
- maker
- Marchant Calculating Machine Company
- ID Number
- MA*335375
- catalog number
- 335375
- accession number
- 318944
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Albree Trulog Spiral Circular Logarithmic Table
- Description
- This is Norman Albree's pilot model for a one-sided logarithmic chart. It is white paper on a wooden disc painted black. There is a clear celluloid indicator that pivots at the center and is cushioned on purple felt. The scale permits readings of logarithms from 10,000 to 100,000. The instrument is marked at the center: ALBREE TRULOG SPIRAL (/) G. NORMAN ALBREE (/) BOSTON. Inside the fifth ring of the spiral is marked: ©1945.
- George Norman Albree (1888–1986), the inventor and donor, attended Amherst College with the Class of 1911 and graduated from Dartmouth in 1912. He is best known for designing the first monoplanes purchased by the U.S. Army in 1917. However, after testing, the military deemed the aircraft too unreliable and slow and declined to order a production run from Albree's employer, the Pigeon Hollow Spar Company of East Boston, Mass.
- See also MA*335484 and MA*335487.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- after 1945
- maker
- Albree, G. Norman
- ID Number
- MA*335486
- catalog number
- 335486
- accession number
- 321674
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Albree Trulog Duplex Circular Logarithm Table
- Description
- This is Norman Albree's pilot model for a two-sided circular logarithmic chart. The side labeled A has a double logarithmic scale arranged in a spiral of seven turns. Its outer edge is marked from 1 to 3.15. The inner edge is marked from .0 to .5. The side labeled B also has a spiral double logarithmic scale, marked from .315 to 1 on the outer edge and from .5 to 1 on the inner edge. A clear plastic cursor folds over the edge of the instrument and is pivoted at the center on both sides.
- The A side is marked inside the fourth spiral: 19©45, and at the center: TRULOG DUPLEX. The B side is marked inside the fourth spiral: 19©45 (/) G. N. Albree, and at the center: G. NORMAN ALBREE. The instrument was received with a hand-sewn brown leather pouch. George Norman Albree, the inventor and donor, was an aeronautical engineer. See also MA*335484 and MA*335486.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- after 1945
- maker
- Albree, G. Norman
- ID Number
- MA*335487
- catalog number
- 335487
- accession number
- 321674
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Skinner Teaching Machine
- Description
- From the 1920s, psychologists have explored ways to automate teaching. In the 1950s, the psychologist B. F. Skinner of Harvard University suggested that techniques he had developed for training rats and pigeons might be adopted for teaching humans. He used this apparatus teaching a Harvard course in natural sciences.
- The machine is a rectangular wooden box with a hinged metal lid with windows. Various paper discs fit inside, with questions and answers written along radii of the discs. One question at a time appears in the window nearer the center. The student writes an answer on a paper tape to the right and advances the mechanism. This reveals the correct answer but covers his answer so that it may not be changed.
- Skinner's "programmed learning" was refined and adopted in many classrooms in the 1960s. It underlies techniques still used in instruction for the office, the home and the school.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1957
- maker
- Skinner, B. F.
- ID Number
- MA*335539
- accession number
- 318945
- catalog number
- 335539
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Pendulum (Small Arc)
- Description (Brief)
- Berenice Abbott's photograph, Pendulum (Small Arc), is a stop-motion photograph. Although the photographer is more well-known for her 1930s abstracted views of New York City's architecture, she wanted to improve the quality of photography for scientists.
- Abbott devised apparatus and techniques to capture various phenomena. Beginning in 1958, she created photographs for the Physical Science Study Committee, a program to reform high school physics teaching. This picture illustrating the swing of a pendulum appeared in 1969 in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space.
- Description
- During the 1920s, Berenice Abbott was one of the premier portrait photographers of Paris, her only competitor was the equally well-known Dada Surrealist Man Ray who had served as her mentor and employer before she launched her own career. An American expatriate, Abbott enjoyed the company of some of the great twentieth century writers and artists, photographing individuals such as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim and James Joyce. One of the critical elements of Abbott’s portraiture was a desire to neither enhance nor interfere with the sitter. She instead wished to allow the personality of her subject to dictate the form of the photograph, and would often sit with her clients for several hours before she even began to photograph them. This straight-forward approach to photography characterized Abbott’s work for the duration of her career.
- Thematically and technically, Abbott’s work can be most closely linked to documentary photographer Eugène Atget (COLL.PHOTOS.000016), who photographed Paris during the early 1900s. Abbott bought a number of his prints the first time she saw them, and even asked him to set some aside that she planned to purchase when she had enough money. After his death in 1927, Abbott took it upon herself to publicize Atget’s work to garner the recognition it deserved. It was partly for this reason she returned to the United States in 1928, hoping to find an American publisher to produce an English-language survey of Atget’s work. Amazed upon her arrival to see the changes New York had undergone during her stay in Paris, and eager to photograph the emerging new metropolis, Abbott decided to pack up her lucrative Parisian portrait business and move back to New York.
- The status and prestige she enjoyed in Paris, however, did not carry over to New York. Abbott did not fit in easily with her contemporaries. She was both a woman in a male-dominated field and a documentary photographer in the midst of an American photographic world firmly rooted in Pictorialism. Abbott recalls disliking the work of both photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his then protégé Paul Strand when she first visited their exhibitions in New York. Stieglitz, along with contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Edward Steichen, tended to romanticize the American landscape and effectively dismissed Abbott’s straight photography as she saw it. Not only was Atget’s work rejected by the Pictorialists, but a series of critical comments she made towards Stieglitz and Pictorialism cost Abbott her professional career as a photographer. Afterwards, she was unable to secure space at galleries, have her work shown at museums or continue the working relationships she had forged with a number of magazine publications.
- In 1935, the Federal Art Project outfitted Abbott with equipment and a staff to complete her project to photograph New York City. The benefit of a personal staff and the freedom to determine her own subject matter was unique among federally funded artists working at that time. The resulting series of photographs, which she titled Changing New York, represent some of Abbott’s best-known work. Her photographs of New York remain one of the most important twentieth century pictorial records of New York City. Abbott went on to produce a series of photographs for varied topics, including scientific textbooks and American suburbs. When the equipment was insufficient to meet her photographic needs, as in the case of her series of science photographs, she invented the tools she needed to achieve the desired effect. In the course of doing so, Abbott patented a number of useful photographic aids throughout her career including an 8x10 patent camera (patent #2869556) and a photographer’s jacket. Abbott also spent twenty years teaching photography classes at the New School for Social Research alongside such greats as composer Aaron Copland and writer W.E.B. DuBois.
- Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Abbott’s career was the printing of Eugène Atget’s photographs, one of the few instances in which one well-known photographer printed a large number of negatives made by another well-known photographer. The struggle to get Atget’s photographs the recognition they deserved was similar to Abbott’s efforts to chart her own path by bringing documentary photography to the fore in a Pictorialist dominated America. Though she experienced varying levels of rejection and trials in both efforts, her perseverance placed her in the position she now holds as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.
- The Bernice Abbott collection consists of sixteen silver prints. The photographs represent a range of work Abbott produced during her lifetime, including her early portraiture work in Paris, her Changing New York series, Physics and Route 1, U.S.A. series.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1950s
- photographer
- Abbott, Berenice
- ID Number
- PG*69.216.15
- catalog number
- 69.216.15
- accession number
- 288852
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Equatorial Sextant
- Description
- William Austin Burt submitted this model of his new equatorial sextant to the U.S. Patent Office in 1856. According to the published patent (#16,002), this instrument could be used to take azimuths, altitude, and time with one observation, and thus enable one to easily obtain the position and bearing of a ship at sea. Burt’s design was ingenious, but this instrument never found much of a market. Burt is better remembered for the solar compass that he introduced in the 1830s.
- Ref: John S. Burt, They Left Their Mark. A Biography of William Austin Burt (Rancho Cordova, Ca., 1985), pp. 128-130.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1856
- maker
- Burt, William A.
- ID Number
- PH*309166
- catalog number
- 309166
- accession number
- 89797
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Universal Magnetometer with Dip Circle
- Description
- This instrument, marked "D.T.M. C.I.W. No 21," was designed and built by the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1912. It incorporates an astronomical telescope and magnetometer for the determination of magnetic declination and horizontal intensity, and a dip circle with a Lloyd-Creak attachment for the determination of inclination and intensity. It is relatively light and easy to manipulate. It was used for a few years and then set aside when the universal magnetometer with earth inductor came into use.
This instrument ended up in the hands of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which transferred it to the Smithsonian in 1959.
Ref: J. A. Fleming, "Two New Types of Magnetometers Made by the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington," Terrestrial Magnetism 16 (1911): 1-12.
Carnegie Institution of Washington. Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Land Magnetic Observations, 1911-1913 (Washington, D.C., 1915), pp. 7-9.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1912
- maker
- Carnegie Institution of Washington. Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
- ID Number
- PH*316504
- accession number
- 225703
- catalog number
- 316504
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Makeba-Kombinator Pencil Slide Rule
- Description
- This instrument combines a mechanical pencil and a slide rule. The pencil has a metal body surrounding a black plastic tube, which is pulled out to move the scales. Four white plastic logarithmic scales are glued to the pencil. One pair of scales is divided logarithmically from 1 to 100 (as A and B scales), and the other pair is divided logarithmically from 1 to 10 (as C and D scales).
- The black plastic tube (underneath one of the A/B scales) is marked: MAKEBA-KOMBINATOR. The black plastic tube surrounds a metal tube and spring, which connect a metal tip and a plastic pusher. A pencil lead is inside the metal tube. A sliding plastic indicator is in a metal frame with a ridged edge for gripping.
- Makeba was established in Bautzen, Germany, in 1922. By the 1950s, it was a sub-brand of Markant, an East German company that copied designs for Pelikan fountain pens as late as the 1970s.
- Reference: Der neue Makeba-Kombinator: Fallstift mit Rechenschieber (Bautzen, East Germany: VEB Füllhalterfabrik Makeba, 1957). According to Worldcat, a copy of this publication is in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig. See http://d-nb.info/574971327.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1957
- maker
- Makeba
- ID Number
- 1977.1120.01
- catalog number
- 336447
- accession number
- 1977.1120
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Dod Protractor and Parallel Rule
- Description
- This brass semicircular protractor is divided by single degrees and marked by tens from 10° to 90° to 10°. It is attached with metal screws to a set of brass parallel rules. Brass S-shaped hinges connect the rules to each other. The bottom left screw on the parallel rules does not attach to the bottom piece. A rectangular brass arm is screwed to the center of the protractor. A thin brass piece screwed to the arm is marked with a small arrow for pointing to the angle markings. The protractor is stored in a wooden case, which also contains a pair of metal dividers (5-1/4" long).
- The base of the protractor is signed: L. Dod, Newark. Lebbeus Dod (1739–1816) manufactured mathematical instruments in New Jersey and is credited with inventing the "parallel rule protractor." He served as a captain of artillery during the Revolutionary War, mainly by making muskets. His three sons, Stephen (1770–1855), Abner (1772–1847), and Daniel (1778–1823), were also noted instrument and clock makers. The family was most associated with Mendham, N.J. (where a historic marker on N.J. Route 24 indicates Dod's house), but Dod is known to have also lived at various times in Newark.
- ID number MA*310890 is a similar protractor and parallel rule.
- References: Bethuel Lewis Dodd and John Robertson Burnet, "Biographical Sketch of Lebbeus Dod," in Genealogies of the Male Descendants of Daniel Dod . . . 1646–1863 (Newark, N.J., 1864), 144–147; Alexander Farnham, "More Information About New Jersey Toolmakers," The Tool Shed, no. 120 (February 2002), http://www.craftsofnj.org/Newjerseytools/Alex%20Farnham%20more%20Jeraey%20Tools/Alex%20Farnham.htm; Deborah J. Warner, “Surveyor's Compass,” National Museum of American History Physical Sciences Collection: Surveying and Geodesy, http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/surveying/object.cfm?recordnumber=747113; Peggy A. Kidwell, "American Parallel Rules: Invention on the Fringes of Industry," Rittenhouse 10, no. 39 (1996): 90–96.
- date made
- late 1700s
- maker
- Dod, Lebbeus
- ID Number
- 1978.2110.06
- accession number
- 1978.2110
- catalog number
- 336732
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
- Next Page