Energy & Power - Overview
The Museum's collections on energy and power illuminate the role of fire, steam, wind, water, electricity, and the atom in the nation's history. The artifacts include wood-burning stoves, water turbines, and windmills, as well as steam, gas, and diesel engines. Oil-exploration and coal-mining equipment form part of these collections, along with a computer that controlled a power plant and even bubble chambers—a tool of physicists to study protons, electrons, and other charged particles.
A special strength of the collections lies in objects related to the history of electrical power, including generators, batteries, cables, transformers, and early photovoltaic cells. A group of Thomas Edison's earliest light bulbs are a precious treasure. Hundreds of other objects represent the innumerable uses of electricity, from streetlights and railway signals to microwave ovens and satellite equipment.
"Energy & Power - Overview" showing 6 items.
Reproduction Carbon Filament Lamp
- Description (Brief)
- This lamp was mass-produced for the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1929
- associated date
- 1879 10 21
- associated person
- Edison, Thomas Alva
- ID Number
- EM*314938
- catalog number
- 314938
- accession number
- 212908
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Reproduction Edison Lamp
- Description (Brief)
- This lamp was mass-produced for the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1929
- ID Number
- EM*320464
- catalog number
- 320464
- accession number
- 241402
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Reproduction Edison Lamp
- Description (Brief)
- This lamp was mass-produced for the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1929
- associated date
- 1879 10 21
- associated person
- Edison, Thomas Alva
- ID Number
- EM*320684
- catalog number
- 320684
- accession number
- 242716
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Reproduction Edison Lamp
- Description (Brief)
- This lamp was mass-produced for the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1929
- associated date
- 1879 10 21
- associated person
- Edison, Thomas Alva
- ID Number
- EM*326672
- catalog number
- 326672
- accession number
- 263165
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Survey boat GRAND
- Description
- Grand is one of four boats used to survey the "ruggedest" 300 miles of the Colorado River's Grand Canyon during the 1923 expedition by the U.S. Geological Survey. Led by Col. Claude Birdseye, the expedition's primary purpose was to survey potential dam sites for the development of hydroelectric power. Indeed, the survey party mapped twenty-one new sites.
- Grand is eighteen feet long, with a beam of four feet, eleven inches. Heavily built of oak, spruce, and cedar, the boat weighs about 900 pounds. Grand is one of three boats ordered in 1921 by the survey's sponsors, the Edison Electric Company, and built at the Fellows and Stewart Shipbuilding Works in San Pedro. The vessels were patterned after those designed by the Kolb brothers, who had based their boats on vessels used by trappers in the upper Colorado River canyons.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1921
- associated date
- 1923
- associated institution
- US Geological Survey
- maker
- Fellows and Stewart Shipbuilding Works
- ID Number
- TR*034381
- catalog number
- 034381
- 34381
- accession number
- 71541
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Carrier Centrifugal Refrigeration Compressor
- Description
- The first successful mechanical refrigeration equipment was patented soon after the Civil War, but the large size and high cost of these early machines restricted their use to industrial processes. In his effort to improve mechanical air-conditioning systems, Willis Haviland Carrier (1876-1950) introduced the first practical centrifugal refrigeration compressor in 1922 (pictured here). This machine provided the foundation for safer, smaller, and more powerful and efficient large-scale air-conditioning systems.
- Prior to the introduction of the centrifugal compressor--which compressed the refrigerant gas through the centrifugal force created by rotors spinning at high speed—reciprocating compressors compressed the refrigerant by the action of pistons inside cylinders, much like an automobile engine. The centrifugal compressor proved an extremely important advancement and paved the way for "comfort" air conditioning in theaters, department stores, hospitals, banks, offices, and hotels.
- Carrier installed this initial compressor at his company's Newark, N.J., offices, where he gave the first public demonstration of the machine on May 22, 1922. Two years later, he sold the compressor to the Onondaga Pottery Company of Syracuse, N.Y., for the air conditioning of its lithography plant. The machine remained in use there until about 1957, when the Carrier Company repurchased the compressor for donation to the Smithsonian. Earlier, in 1924, the Carrier Company had installed centrifugal refrigeration machines in the J. L. Hudson department store in Detroit and the Palace Theater in Dallas, thereby introducing the phrase "air conditioning" into the public vocabulary.
- date made
- 1922
- maker
- Carrier Corporation
- ID Number
- MC*318219
- catalog number
- 318219
- accession number
- 232896
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center