Engineering, Building, and Architecture - Overview
Not many museums collect houses. The National Museum of American History has four, as well as two outbuildings, 11 rooms, an elevator, many building components, and some architectural elements from the White House. Drafting manuals are supplemented by many prints of buildings and other architectural subjects. The breadth of the museum's collections adds some surprising objects to these holdings, such as fans, purses, handkerchiefs, T-shirts, and other objects bearing images of buildings.
The engineering artifacts document the history of civil and mechanical engineering in the United States. So far, the Museum has declined to collect dams, skyscrapers, and bridges, but these and other important engineering achievements are preserved through blueprints, drawings, models, photographs, sketches, paintings, technical reports, and field notes.
"Engineering, Building, and Architecture - Overview" showing 2 items.
Family Fallout Shelter
- Description
- The family fallout shelter represents the public policy assumptions of the atomic age, namely, that with enough preparation, the American family and with it the nation's social and political fabric would survive a nuclear attack. This free-standing, double-hulled steel shelter was installed beneath the front yard of Mr. and Mrs. Murland E. Anderson of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The Andersons purchased their shelter from J. L. Haverstock, a Ft. Wayne realtor who began selling family fallout shelters as a sideline in early 1955 after reading a promotional Life magazine article.
- The Andersons maintained the shelter from its installation in 1955 through the 1960s, a period spanning the development of the hydrogen bomb and the Cuban missile crisis. Insufficiently anchored against Ft. Wayne's high water table when first installed, the shelter popped to the surface of the Anderson front yard in time for the Cuban missile crisis and was quickly reinterred in a frenzy of shelter building activity in 1961. The donors purchased the property, including the shelter, from the Andersons in 1968.
- Date made
- 1950
- date made
- 1950s-1960s
- maker
- Universal Tank & Iron Works, Inc.
- ID Number
- 2005.0051.04
- accession number
- 2005.0051
- catalog number
- 2005.0051.04
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Keuffel & Esser 68-1944 Demonstration Slide Rule
- Description
- This is a one-sided 79-inch demonstration slide rule from 1967. It is made of painted wood, with a plastic cursor that has a wooden frame. In the early seventeenth century, the Scottish mathematician John Napier discovered functions known as logarithms which make it possible to reduce problems of multiplication, division, and taking the roots of numbers to additions and subtractions.
- On a slide rule, the logarithms of numbers are represented as lengths. To multiply, one length is set on the base, and another added to it using the slide. The sum of the logarithms, which gives the product, is read off using the cursor. This slide rule also has scales for finding the squares, cubes, square roots, and cube roots of numbers.
- Slide rules first became popular in the United States in the 1890s, especially among engineers and scientists. Use of the device was taught in high schools and universities using oversized instruments like this. During the 1960s, the United States placed new emphasis on teaching mathematics and science. This slide rule was purchased and used at a high school for girls in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By the late 1970s, slide rules would be almost entirely displaced by handheld electronic calculators.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1967
- fabricator
- Keuffel & Esser Co.
- ID Number
- 1987.0137.01
- accession number
- 1987.0137
- catalog number
- 1987.0137.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center