A selvage width strip of woven wool dress fabric in black, Both selvages intact. White handwritten piece of paper stapled at one end, marked: "Dress stuff for women (/) manufactured at Reims (France) (/) 1 metre long (3.28 feet) x 1 metre (/) (3.28 feet) wide (/) Whole sale price (/) francs 2./25 (43/4 cents) the metre."
France was an important manufacturer of various qualities of woolen fabrics for both the domestic and export markets. It is likely that this group of selvage width strips of wool were all collected by a US Consular officer and sent back to the Dept. of Commerce as an example of the quality of the competition American woolen manufacturers faced in products from French manufacturers.
Consular Collection: Part of collection of samples acquired by US Consuls overseas between about 1898 and 1918, in the interests of promoting US trade and business opportunities; which was transferred by the Dept. of Commerce in the 1920s-30s.
Francis Anthony Tondorf, S.J., director of the newly established seismological laboratory at Georgetown University, ordered several new seismographs in 1911. This one, which was advertised as “Dr. Mainka’s Small size Conic Pendulum,” was the first of its kind in the United States. It was designed by Carl Mainka, manager of the instrument department of the Imperial Station for earthquake investigations in Strasbourg, and manufactured by J. & A. Bosch, a firm that specialized in instruments for seismology and meteorology.
This seismograph stands 1.6 meters high and has two 130-kilogram masses, one for each horizontal motion. Registration occurs on a smoked paper mounted on a rotating aluminum cylinder. It came to the Smithsonian in 1961.
Ref: J. & A. Bosch, Seismographen (Strassburg, 1910), pp. 6-7.
C. Mainka, “Das bifilare Kegelpendel,” Mitteikugen der Philomathischen Gessellschaft in Elsasz-Lothringen 4 (1912): 633-667. This was reprinted as C. Mainka, Das bifilare Kegelpendel: (Instrumente für die Aufzeitnung von Erdbeben (Strasburg, 1913).
“G.U.’s Observatory Finest,” Washington Post (Feb. 27, 1911), p. 2.
