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 7 items.
Keuffel & Esser 4015 Fuller's Spiral Cylindrical Slide Rule
- Description
- This rule consists of an outer wooden cylinder that both slides up and down and rotates. Two brass rings lined with felt are inside this cylinder. The cylinder is covered with paper marked with a single spiral logarithmic scale graduated into 7,250 parts and having a length, according to the maker, of 500 inches (nearly 42 feet). This length permitted computations up to four or five significant digits.
- Inside the outer cylinder is a longer wooden cylinder, covered with paper marked with decimal, conversion, and sine tables. A solid mahogany handle is at one end. A brass index is screwed to the top of the handle. A second, longer brass index is screwed to the mahogany base and marked with a scale of equal parts used in finding logarithms. A third, removable, nickel-plated brass cylinder is inside the instrument and attached to the base. There is no case.
- The tables on the middle cylinder include: decimal equivalents of feet and inches in feet; decimal equivalents of quarter weights and pounds in hundredweights; decimal equivalents of ounces and pounds in fractions of a pound; decimal equivalents of pounds, shillings, and pence in fractions of a pound; decimal equivalents of pence in shillings; days of the year as a fraction of the year; decimal equivalents of subunits of an acre; properties of various metals and woods; decimal equivalents of minutes of a degree in degrees; the Birmingham wire gauge; various conversion factors (mostly for weights and measures); and natural sines.
- The outer, sliding cylinder is marked near the top: FULLERS SPIRAL SLIDE RULE. Near the bottom is marked: ENTD. STATS. HALL; STANLEY, Maker, LONDON. The bottom is stamped: 1389. The top of the long brass index is engraved: 1389 (/) 1901. According to Wayne Feely, these numbers indicate the instrument has serial number 1389 and was made by Stanley in 1901. A white celluloid tag affixed to the handle reads: KEUFFEL & ESSER CO. (/) ST. LOUIS. CHICAGO. (/) NEW YORK. (/) U.S.A. In the 1901 Keuffel & Esser catalog, Fuller's Spiral Slide Rule is listed as Model 4015 and priced at $30.00.
- See also MA*311958, 1998.0046.01, and MA*316575.
- References: Wayne E. Feely, "The Fuller Spiral Scale Slide Rule," Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 50, no. 3 (1997): 93–98; Catalogue of Keuffel & Esser (New York, 1901), 290; James J. Fenton, "Fuller's Calculating Slide-Rule," Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 22 (1886): 57–61; Dieter von Jezierski, Slide Rules: A Journey Through Three Centuries, trans. Rodger Shepherd (Mendham, N.J.: Astragal Press, 2000), 42–43; George Fuller, Instructions for the Use of the Fuller Calculator (London: W. F. Stanley & Co., Ltd., [about 1950]), http://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KEManuals/4015/4015.htm. An 1879 first edition of the instructions manual was received with the instrument and is stored in the accession file.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1901
- inventor
- Fuller, George
- retailer
- Keuffel & Esser Co.
- maker
- Stanley, William Ford
- ID Number
- MA*313751
- catalog number
- 313751
- maker number
- 1380/1901
- accession number
- 179682
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
H-K Toy Electric Motor
- Description (Brief)
- This toy electric motor was made by the H-K Electric Toy Company of Indianapolis, Indiana around 1906. The patents on this object refer to an electric toy that recreates mechanical motion. A dry cell battery could fit in the center of the toy, energizing the electromagnets on the side, contracting its three lever-arms. When this contraction happens, the shaft rotates, and the protruding part of the shaft comes into contact with the metal prong causing the circuit that powered the electromagnet to break. This releases the lever-arms, which rotates the shaft as they rise, re-engaging the electromagnets and continuing the cycle. The weighted flywheel and staggered strength of the levers helped ensure that the drive shaft continued to rotate. The drive shaft could be connected to a variety of factory toys and provide them with a sense of realistic motion like their full size counterparts.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1906
- ID Number
- MC*329034
- catalog number
- 329034
- accession number
- 278175
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Toy Electric Motor and Lineshaft
- Description (Brief)
- This toy electric motor or generator was made by an unknown maker around 1908. There is a commutator and flywheel at the base that attaches to line shaft with three pulleys at the top. An engine could be attached to the drive shaft of the toy, rotating the center wheel in a magnetic field, producing an electric current.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1908
- ID Number
- MC*329037
- catalog number
- 329037
- accession number
- 278175
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Toy Electric Motor
- Description (Brief)
- This electric motor is possibly a Weeden No. 117 motor that was manufactured by the Weeden Manufacturing Company of New Bedford, Massachusetts from around 1916 until 1918. The motor turns the drive wheel, which could be attached to a line shaft with pulleys to power a variety of machine shop toy accessories.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1900
- .'1900
- ID Number
- MC*329038
- catalog number
- 329038
- accession number
- 278175
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Paradox Toy Gas Engine
- Description (Brief)
- This Paradox gas engine was made by the Pardox Gas Engine Company of Hartford, Connecticut around 1900-1930. The engine ran on a mixture of “illumination gas,” an early gas used to light homes that was generated from coal. The engine was attached to an ordinary gas burner by a rubber tube, and advertising described it as “running with an explosion at each revolution.” The engine has two 3.5-inch flywheels, and the base bears the inscription “PAT. NOV. 20 1900.” G.J. Altham & J. Beattie Jr. of Fall River, Massachusetts received patent number 662,181 for this invention that related to “a simple and efficient valveless engine adapted for use in small size as a toy.”
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1900
- ID Number
- MC*329045
- catalog number
- 329045
- accession number
- 278175
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Essex Patented Engine
- Description (Brief)
- Henry Essex of Buffalo, New York received patent number 723,660 in 1903 for this design of a caloric engine. The engine is a “hot air” or caloric engine, where heated air powers the piston before being cooled and returning to be heated, continuously producing work. The engine consists of a flywheel at one end with displacing rod, a heating element in the center with two piston inside, and cool air pockets on either side of the center.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1903
- ID Number
- MC*329058
- catalog number
- 329058
- accession number
- 278175
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Half Model, Fishing Schooner Helen B. Thomas
- Description
- Unlike most of the half-hull models in the Smithsonian’s National Watercraft Collection, this one was not intended for use in shipbuilding. Instead, this half model of the fishing schooner Helen B. Thomas was made to show a radical design innovation to potential vessel owners. Its maker, Thomas F. McManus, a naval architect in Boston, adapted an idea from sailing yachts to the fishing schooners of New England. He eliminated the bowsprit, the spar projecting forward from the schooner’s bow, in an attempt to make the vessel safer for the fishermen working in treacherous conditions far offshore. In McManus’s new design, fishermen would not have to clamber out on the bowsprit to tend the jib (the vessel’s forward-most sail), a dangerous task especially in bad weather that, in McManus’s view, resulted too often in injury or death.
- McManus made this half-hull model and displayed it in his Boston office, hoping to attract a client. After nearly a year, Capt. William Thomas of Portland, Maine, decided to try the design and contracted with the Oxner & Story yard in Essex, Mass., to build the schooner. The Helen B. Thomas was launched in 1902 and measured 106’-7” overall, with a beam (width) of 21’-6” and 13’ deep. The vessel became a successful fishing schooner. While no other schooners were built to this exact design, many were built without the bowsprit, a schooner design that became known as the “knockabout.”
- date made
- 1901
- Associated Date
- early 20th century
- ship built from model design
- 1902
- Captain who contracted the design
- Thomas, William
- contractors who built the ship
- Oxner & Story
- maker
- McManus, Thomas F.
- ID Number
- TR*310888
- catalog number
- 310888
- accession number
- 131237
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center