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 6 items.
Post Instruction Manual for Versalog Slide Rule
- Description
- This is a later printing of 1978.0800.02. Its citation information is: E. I. Fiesenheiser, Versalog Slide Rule Instruction Manual, with R. A. Budenholzer and B. A. Fisher (Chicago: Frederick Post Company, 1963). The text appears not to have been revised since these three Illinois Institute of Technology engineering professors helped invent the Versalog slide rule and wrote instructions for using it in 1951. Marks inside the front cover indicate this copy was offered for sale in January 1969 for $1.00.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1963
- maker
- Frederick Post Co.
- ID Number
- 1980.0097.03
- accession number
- 1980.0097
- catalog number
- 1980.0097.03
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Pickett N15-T Hydraulic Duplex Slide Rule for Georgia Iron Works
- Description
- From the 1650s people have devised special-purpose slide rules for tasks such as carpentry and tax collection. In 1961 Danforth (Danny) W. Hagler of the Georgia Iron Works Company in Augusta, Ga., designed this slide rule to replace the 100-page notebook of graphs carried by each GIW engineer. GIW also distributed the rule to customers to assist with ordering and operating pumps and pipelines. Pickett & Eckel, the California slide rule manufacturer, assisted with the design and produced the slide rules. For Pickett company history, see 1998.0119.02 and 2000.0203.01.
- This ten-inch, two-sided white aluminum instrument has metal endpieces and a nylon cursor with white plastic edges. The front has logarithmic scales for calculating the kinetic energy and flow rate of a liquid or slurry moving through a pipeline. The top of the base is marked: HYDRAULIC SLIDE RULE (/) GEORGIA IRON WORKS CO. (/) EST. 1891 (/) AUGUSTA GEORGIA. The left end of the slide has a GIW logo. The right end of the slide has the triangular Pickett logo used between 1958 and 1962 and is marked: 338. The bottom of the base is marked: DESIGNED BY D. W. HAGLER.
- The back has logarithmic scales for determining the head produced by a pump, impeller peripheral speed, brake horsepower, and specific speed. Standard C and D scales were added around 1969. The right end of the slide is marked: PICKETT (/) MODEL N 15-T (/) 337. The rule fits in an orange leather case with a belt loop. The front of the case is marked: HYDRAULIC SLIDE RULE (/) GIW (/) D. W. HAGLER (/) Pickett. The case fits inside a redwood box.
- This particular rule was Hagler's personal example of the instrument in production. GIW was his family's business, and his brother, Tom, wrote an instruction manual for the rule (2009.0100.02). Hagler went on to work on computer software for production control. He sold his interest in GIW in 1986.
- References: Helen Callahan, Georgia Iron Works: The First 100 Years (Columbia, S.C.: The R. L. Bryan Company, [1991]), 46–49; Michael V. Konshak, "Developing the Georgia Iron Works Hydraulic Slide Rule: Negotiating with Pickett & Eckel to Make a Special Slide Rule," Journal of the Oughtred Society 19, no. 2 (2010): 33–37; accession file.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1961
- maker
- Pickett & Eckel, Incorporated
- ID Number
- 2009.0100.01
- accession number
- 2009.0100
- catalog number
- 2009.0100.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Instruction Manual for Georgia Iron Works Hydraulic Slide Rule
- Description
- The citation information for this 20-page stapled booklet is: T. W. Hagler, Jr., GIW Hydraulic Slide Rule Instructions [and] Formulas, rev. ed. (Georgia Iron Works Co., 1969). Tom Hagler wrote this explanation of the slide rule designed by his brother, Danny, for the pump manufacturing firm owned by their family in Grovetown, Ga. The rule made it easier for the company's engineers to make calculations related to the flow of slurry in pipelines and pumps. See 2009.0100.01. The rule illustrated in this booklet, which has C and D scales, is a later version of the instrument than the example in the collections. The booklet also contains instructions for caring for the rule that presumably came from its maker, Pickett Industries (formerly Pickett & Eckel) of Santa Barbara, Calif.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1969
- maker
- Georgia Iron Works Co.
- ID Number
- 2009.0100.02
- catalog number
- 2009.0100.02
- accession number
- 2009.0100
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Documentation Relating to GIW Hydraulic Slide Rule
- Description
- In the mid-twentieth century, engineers designing slide rules often carried out extensive calculations by hand. The documentation for the Georgia Iron Works hydraulic slide rule (2009.0100.01) includes numerous pages of such calculations, as well as four blueprints showing the design of the rule. Correspondence between Danforth W. Hagler, who designed the slide rule, and officials of Pickett & Eckel Company, the manufacturer, is also included. The letters and drawings are dated 1961.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1961
- maker
- Georgia Iron Works Co.
- ID Number
- 2009.0100.04
- accession number
- 2009.0100
- catalog number
- 2009.0100.04
- 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
Model of Bucyrus-Erie Stripping Shovel
- Description
- In 1960, the Bucyrus-Erie Company of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, presented this 14-inch-high, scale model of what was to become the world's largest stripping shovel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later that year, the President transferred this gift to the Smithsonian Institution. The Bucyrus-Erie Company had custom-designed this monster machine for the Peabody Coal Company. Bucyrus-Erie engineers anticipated that they would need two years to manufacture the behemoth, and an additional six months to assemble it at the site of the open-pit mine. (They planned to ship the machine's parts in over 250 railcars.) When finished, the shovel would weigh 7,000 tons, soar to the roofline of a 20-story building (some 220 feet high), and be able to extend its enormous 115-cubic-yard dipper over 460 feet, or about the length of an average city block. (The dipper's capacity would equal that of about six stand-sized dump trucks.) Fifty electric motors-ranging from 1/4 to 3,000 horsepower-would power the shovel, which was designed to be controlled by a single operator, perched in a cab five stories high. Publicists for Bucyrus-Erie called this the "largest self-powered mobile land vehicle ever built."
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1960
- recipient
- Eisenhower, Dwight D.
- maker
- Bucyrus-Erie Company
- ID Number
- MC*317688
- catalog number
- 317688
- accession number
- 231557
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center