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 5 items.
Hemmi Duplex Slide Rule Retailed by Post (Versalog 1460)
- Description
- The Frederick Post Company, a 20th-century manufacturer and retailer of scientific instruments based in Chicago, did not make its own slide rules. From 1932, its exclusive supplier of linear slide rules was Hemmi, a Japanese firm. Hemmi was known for using a large-diameter variety of bamboo grown in Kagoshima Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. Company founder Jiro Hemmi (1878–1953) patented this innovation in several nations, including the United States in 1920.
- While Post usually sold standard Hemmi models, around 1951 Hemmi created two ten-inch slide rules solely for Post, which sold in the United States as the model 1450 Versatrig and model 1460 Versalog. The Versalog was especially popular, selling several hundred thousand copies.
- This example is bamboo, coated on all sides (except the ends) with white celluloid. The rule is held together with metal posts, one of which is engraved on the front: Wm. Krutz. The glass indicator has a metal frame with plastic sides. One side is marked: HEMMI JAPAN. The other side bears a Post logo in red, which has largely been rubbed away. The red Post logo and the serial number 015836 appear on the right front of the slide. The serial number indicates the rule was manufactured in 1959. This is confirmed by the date code JI on the bottom edge of the rule, which corresponds to a manufacturing date of September 1959.
- The top edge of the rule is marked: CAT. NO. 1460; VERSALOG; FREDERICK POST CO.; HEMMI BAMBOO – JAPAN. The front of the base has LL0, LL/0, K, DF, D, R1, R2, AND L scales. The front of the slide bears CF, CIF, CI, and C scales. The LL/0, CIF, and CI scales are numbered in red. The back of the base has LL/1, LL/2, LL/3, D, LL3, LL2, AND LL1 scales. The back of the slide has T, Sec T and ST, Cos and S, and C scales. The LL/1, LL/2, LL/3, T, and Sec T scales are numbered in red. All the other scales are navy.
- The rule fits into a black Fabrikoid case with a leather flap (stamped POST). The case could be hung from the user's belt, and it is labeled: W. K. KRUTZ. The case is stored in a red, white, and black cardboard box, along with a guarantee from Post and a ruler-sized white plastic set of conversion tables, copyrighted in 1950 by the Eugene Dietzgen Co., another prominent slide rule manufacturer. The rule also arrived with an instruction booklet, 1978.0800.02.
- References: Jiro Hemmi, "Slide-Rule" (U.S. Patent 1,329,902 issued February 3, 1920); Walter Shawlee II, Ted Hume, and Paul Ross, "The Post Slide Rule Archive," Sphere Research Corporation, http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/post.html; Bob Otnes, "Notes on Frederick Post Slide Rules," Journal of the Oughtred Society 7, no. 1 (1998): 7–10; Paul Ross and Ted Hume, "Slide Rules of the Frederick Post Company," Journal of the Oughtred Society 9, no. 2 (2000): 37–46; Ted Hume, "The Popular Post Versalog Slide Rule," Journal of the Oughtred Society 15, no. 1 (2006): 53–55; William Lise, "Japanese Slide Rules," 19 August 2004, accessed via Internet Archive Wayback Machine; E. I. Fiesenheiser, The Versalog Slide Rule: An Instruction Manual (Chicago: The Frederick Post Company, 1951).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1959
- maker
- SUN HEMMI JAPAN CF
- inventor
- Frederick Post Co.
- ID Number
- 1978.0800.01
- catalog number
- 336682
- accession number
- 1978.0800
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Ford Coupe Stock Car, 1952
- Description
- In 1952, Leon Hurd extensively modified this 1932 Ford coupe, beefing-up the frame and installing stronger springs, and installing a 1942 Ford "59A"-block "flathead" V-8 engine. Initially the car ran without fenders, during the short time that was permitted by the Atlantic Racing Association racing rules. (NASCAR was in its infancy.)
- Hurd raced in New England from 1952 through 1955, winning more than 100 races in that time. The car carried racing number "00." In 1979, Hurd did some minor restoration on the car.World War II period saw a relative explosion of motor racing on both sides of the Atlantic and a proliferation of distinctly American types of racing with no counterparts in Europe. One such uniquely American type was "stock car" racing. Popular interest was whetted by races run with cars that were entirely like - or mostly looked like - those for sale in the showrooms or on the used-car lots. Fans could cheer for cars that looked like the cars they drove in everyday use.
- Most auto racers preferred two-door coupes: a smaller, two-door car was lighter for better acceleration yet could house a powerful engine; and a coupe had a roof, which helped protect the driver in roll-overs, which were not uncommon in the pell-mell anarchy of beach races. To help him set rules for stock-car racing, Bill France created the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, NASCAR, in 1948; NASCAR's first season was 1949. Then France had another idea: too many spectators could enjoy his beach races without paying the admission charges for his viewing areas closer to the course. So why not build a modern oval race track away from the beach, surrounded by bleachers, and thus configured so that any and all spectators had to pay to see the races - and far more spectators at that?
- It was an old idea, actually. In the US from about 1910, the dominant money in the early years of auto racing came from entrepreneurial track owners (many of whom had previously owned bicycle tracks or velodromes). Track owners knew that strict control of access to the racing venues was the key to maximum income from spectators. And oval tracks gave by far the best view to the most customers, also a motivating factor for ticket buyers. (In contrast, Europe and Britain never developed such enclosed oval tracks. Very wealthy car-owners and manufacturers have always controlled auto racing there, and such elite car-owners and manufacturers have strongly preferred open-road courses as more sporting - and also more likely to help improve auto design technology. Thus modern European closed tracks still follow the "open road" idea, with lots of turns and curves.)
- Bill France saw the success of the paved oval track built at Darlington, SC, in 1950. So, with his business model in hand based on droves of paying race fans, France began raising money in 1953 and, a few years later, opened a new Daytona Speedway. NASCAR came of age in 1959, with the first running of the Daytona 500.
- "Stock-car" racing found a home quickly in the South, where "moonshiners" or "rum runners" during Prohibition had been modifying ordinary-looking cars with "souped-up" engines (i.e., modified for greater power) and stiffened suspensions -- and hidden tanks for booze -- to outrun federal marshals on backwoods roads when necessary to elude arrest. But organized stock-car racing on closed courses -- beginning in the late 1940s -- found eager fans as well in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West; the South had no monopoly. Sponsorship money, particularly from local auto dealers, became more plentiful; "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" soon became a byword among retail car dealers. The cheaper, individually owned stock cars -- coupes that were often referred to as "jalopies" -- raced on local and regional dirt tracks. Well-sponsored cars fielded by wealthier owners with funding and engineering assistance from Detroit manufacturers raced at larger, paved oval tracks with extensive bleachers for the fans.
- Track owners set the pattern for organized stock-car racing. Bill France, of Daytona Beach, Florida, had witnessed the popularity of pre-war "beach racing" (see Web entry on the racing automobile, Winton 'Bullet' No. 1). In the late 1940s, he organized beach races for any local car-owners who liked the idea of competing against each other with more-or-less "stock" automobiles.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1952
- maker
- Hurd, Leon H.
- ID Number
- 1992.0029.01
- accession number
- 1992.0029
- catalog number
- 1992.0029.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
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
Post Instruction Manual for Versalog Slide Rule
- Description
- In 1950 and 1951, three Illinois Institute of Technology engineering professors participated in the development of the Versalog slide rule, manufactured by Hemmi of Tokyo, Japan, for the Frederick Post Company of Chicago. E. I. Fiesenheiser, R. A. Budenholzer, and B. A. Fischer subsequently prepared this 115-page hardcover volume explaining the slide rule's capabilities. They covered the care of the instrument, its twenty-three scales, multiplication and division, squares and cubes, exponentials and logarithms, and trigonometric operations. Each professor also contributed a chapter on applications in his specialty: civil, mechanical, or electrical engineering.
- This copy is stamped inside the front cover and on the edges: WILLIAM KRUTZ ESQ. See 1978.0800.01.
- Reference: E. I. Fiesenheiser, The Versalog Slide Rule: An Instruction Manual (Chicago: The Frederick Post Company, 1951), http://sliderulemuseum.com/Manuals/M34_Post_Versalog_1951.pdf.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1951
- publisher
- Frederick Post Co.
- maker
- Frederick Post Co.
- ID Number
- 1978.0800.02
- accession number
- 1978.0800
- catalog number
- 1978.0800.02
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Mural Painting, The Currents
- Description
- These ten painted aluminum panels comprised a wall mural aboard the ocean liner SS United States. Called “The Currents,” the mural depicts the Atlantic Ocean with the direction of the ocean’s currents rendered in stylized, dimensional arrows. The continents are applied to the panels in gold leaf, while the ocean is painted in various shades of blue and green. Aboard the ship this mural was located on the starboard side of the first class observation lounge. “The Currents” and a companion mural called “The Winds” were painted by artist Raymond John Wendell.
- Designed by naval architect William Francis Gibbs, the SS United States was created out of an unusually close connection to the federal government. During the Second World War, the U.S. Navy recognized that converted ocean liners were effective transports for conveying troops to far-flung war zones. After the war ended, the government pursued the building of a technologically advanced passenger vessel that could be converted to carry troops in the event of another global conflict. With significant federal funding and support, the SS United States was built and launched in 1952. Although it was never converted for wartime use, many of its design details remained classified into the 1970s.
- One of the most unusual features of the ship was the tremendous amount of aluminum and the lack of wood Gibbs specified for its construction. Determined to build a ship that was not only fast, but ultra-safe, Gibbs was especially concerned with fire prevention after several wartime catastrophes. One that haunted him was the story of the luxury liner RMS Empress of Britain that was attacked by a German bomber while transporting hundreds of soldiers on October 26, 1940. Sixty-four troops were killed in the resulting blaze, which was fueled by the ship’s lavish wood carvings, staircases, and paneled rooms.
- Two thousand tons of aluminum were used in the construction and outfitting of the SS United States, making the ship lighter and more fire-resistant than any vessel afloat. The furniture and artwork, including these panels, were all made of aluminum. Publicists for the ship claimed that the only wood on board was to be found in the galley’s chopping blocks and in the piano. Gibbs even tried to reduce this miniscule amount of wood, but Steinway & Sons allegedly refused to build an aluminum piano. To this day, the SS United States is considered the fastest and one of the safest ships ever put to sea.
- date made
- 1952
- SS United States built and launched
- 1952
- naval architect of SS United States
- Gibbs, William Francis
- painter
- Wendell, Raymond John
- ID Number
- TR*336767.154
- catalog number
- 336767.154
- accession number
- 1978.2219
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center