Blood glucose monitoring kit with packaging, clam shell case, soft carrying case, lancets, normal glucose control solution, test strips, Penlet II lancing device, two Owner's Booklets (1990,1992), warranty card, Procedure Guide, trifold coupon for test strips, three "Important Information" cards, and Logbook.
Box is blue and white with red, black, and white print with picture of blood glucose monitor on the front and back of the box and pictorial instructions on the back. Kit includes a hard plastic "clam shell" case containing a gray plastic blood glucose monitor with dark gray print, LCD display panel, and one dark gray button. Handwritten "J. Roe" on the back of the blood glucose monitor. The case also holds three light blue, plastic lancets, and one white, black and purple test strip. Case has "J. Roe" handwritten on the back. The kit also includes a spiral-bound Owner's Booklet (1992), a black vinyl carrying case with black metal zipper, two small white and blue plastic bottles of normal glucose control solution, white and black plastic canister of test strips, and a grey plastic Penlet II lancing device and deep penetration cap.
Printed on box: Simple one touch testing. / Full featured for easier diabetes management : / 250-test memory with date and time, / Automatic 14-day test average, / Event marker - to organize test results. / Accurate results in only 45 seconds.
Gold piece representing the British King Charles II’s power to heal or prevent scrofula. One side has an image of an angel with spear slaying a dragon and the words “SOLID GLORIA.” The other side has an image of a 3-masted ship, with the words “CAR. . . ET. HI. REX.”
Large, single-reeded circular dish with deep, rounded booge and flat well engraved at center "S.C. / 1748." in a shaded, leafy-scrolled font accented by flourishes; no foot ring. Underside struck with six marks, twice with the lion-in-gateway touch mark of Thomas Danforth II, above four pseudo-hallmarks (left to right): "I.D", lion's head erased facing left, Britannia seated, and dagger or sword pointing up, all in shaped shields.
Mark was used by Thomas Danforth II (1731-1782) of Middletown, CT; working 1755-1782.
In the early years of motoring, the Burma-Vita Company found a novel way to advertise its brushless shaving cream. Burma-Shave advertising signs, with their humorous, serial jingles, were spaced far apart on the roadside and made sense only to someone traveling at 35 miles per hour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, motorists had fun piecing the rhymes together, one phrase at a time, and reaching the wry, witty punch line. They memorized favorite verses and looked forward to the entertainment value of the signs, especially during long trips. Burma-Shave signs were the equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box or the saying in a fortune cookie. They became a classic American form of visual communication in a league with comic strips and greeting cards, and like those whimsical media, the signs became part of twentieth century popular culture. Burma-Shave signs became a national favorite because they humanized highway travel and gave motorists a new way to consume the roadside. They touched many facets of American life; farmers repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students pilfered them. Verses supported the war effort during World War II and anti-inflation efforts after the war. At the height of the program, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. But by the 1950s, television advertising made rival products more popular than Burma-Shave, and televised ads were more cost-effective than sending a team of sign installers out on the road. Increased highway speeds and limited-access highways also contributed to the decline of the Burma-Shave phenomenon. The sign program ended in 1963.
In the early years of motoring, the Burma-Vita Company found a novel way to advertise its brushless shaving cream. Burma-Shave advertising signs, with their humorous, serial jingles, were spaced far apart on the roadside and made sense only to someone traveling at 35 miles per hour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, motorists had fun piecing the rhymes together, one phrase at a time, and reaching the wry, witty punch line. They memorized favorite verses and looked forward to the entertainment value of the signs, especially during long trips. Burma-Shave signs were the equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box or the saying in a fortune cookie. They became a classic American form of visual communication in a league with comic strips and greeting cards, and like those whimsical media, the signs became part of twentieth century popular culture. Burma-Shave signs became a national favorite because they humanized highway travel and gave motorists a new way to consume the roadside. They touched many facets of American life; farmers repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students pilfered them. Verses supported the war effort during World War II and anti-inflation efforts after the war. At the height of the program, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. But by the 1950s, television advertising made rival products more popular than Burma-Shave, and televised ads were more cost-effective than sending a team of sign installers out on the road. Increased highway speeds and limited-access highways also contributed to the decline of the Burma-Shave phenomenon. The sign program ended in 1963.
In the early years of motoring, the Burma-Vita Company found a novel way to advertise its brushless shaving cream. Burma-Shave advertising signs, with their humorous, serial jingles, were spaced far apart on the roadside and made sense only to someone traveling at 35 miles per hour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, motorists had fun piecing the rhymes together, one phrase at a time, and reaching the wry, witty punch line. They memorized favorite verses and looked forward to the entertainment value of the signs, especially during long trips. Burma-Shave signs were the equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box or the saying in a fortune cookie. They became a classic American form of visual communication in a league with comic strips and greeting cards, and like those whimsical media, the signs became part of twentieth century popular culture. Burma-Shave signs became a national favorite because they humanized highway travel and gave motorists a new way to consume the roadside. They touched many facets of American life; farmers repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students pilfered them. Verses supported the war effort during World War II and anti-inflation efforts after the war. At the height of the program, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. But by the 1950s, television advertising made rival products more popular than Burma-Shave, and televised ads were more cost-effective than sending a team of sign installers out on the road. Increased highway speeds and limited-access highways also contributed to the decline of the Burma-Shave phenomenon. The sign program ended in 1963.
In the early years of motoring, the Burma-Vita Company found a novel way to advertise its brushless shaving cream. Burma-Shave advertising signs, with their humorous, serial jingles, were spaced far apart on the roadside and made sense only to someone traveling at 35 miles per hour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, motorists had fun piecing the rhymes together, one phrase at a time, and reaching the wry, witty punch line. They memorized favorite verses and looked forward to the entertainment value of the signs, especially during long trips. Burma-Shave signs were the equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box or the saying in a fortune cookie. They became a classic American form of visual communication in a league with comic strips and greeting cards, and like those whimsical media, the signs became part of twentieth century popular culture. Burma-Shave signs became a national favorite because they humanized highway travel and gave motorists a new way to consume the roadside. They touched many facets of American life; farmers repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students pilfered them. Verses supported the war effort during World War II and anti-inflation efforts after the war. At the height of the program, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. But by the 1950s, television advertising made rival products more popular than Burma-Shave, and televised ads were more cost-effective than sending a team of sign installers out on the road. Increased highway speeds and limited-access highways also contributed to the decline of the Burma-Shave phenomenon. The sign program ended in 1963.
In the early years of motoring, the Burma-Vita Company found a novel way to advertise its brushless shaving cream. Burma-Shave advertising signs, with their humorous, serial jingles, were spaced far apart on the roadside and made sense only to someone traveling at 35 miles per hour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, motorists had fun piecing the rhymes together, one phrase at a time, and reaching the wry, witty punch line. They memorized favorite verses and looked forward to the entertainment value of the signs, especially during long trips. Burma-Shave signs were the equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box or the saying in a fortune cookie. They became a classic American form of visual communication in a league with comic strips and greeting cards, and like those whimsical media, the signs became part of twentieth century popular culture. Burma-Shave signs became a national favorite because they humanized highway travel and gave motorists a new way to consume the roadside. They touched many facets of American life; farmers repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students pilfered them. Verses supported the war effort during World War II and anti-inflation efforts after the war. At the height of the program, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. But by the 1950s, television advertising made rival products more popular than Burma-Shave, and televised ads were more cost-effective than sending a team of sign installers out on the road. Increased highway speeds and limited-access highways also contributed to the decline of the Burma-Shave phenomenon. The sign program ended in 1963.
Americans of the post-World War II era were not wine drinkers. In the 1950’s, wine consumption was generally confined either to a few well-traveled people near each coast who associated wine with fine dining, both customarily French, or to members of ethnic communities who had long drunk both homemade and imported wines with foods common to their community. Infrequent wine consumers often drank “Chianti” at inexpensive Italian-American restaurants where they consumed their spaghetti and lasagna with wine from familiar straw covered green bottles (fiaschi) placed on the red checked tablecloths. The same bottles, once emptied, served as candleholders and decorative touches in these neighborhood gathering places, and these same straw-covered bottles of Italian wine were often among the few wines available at liquor stores throughout the country.
Students, communards, beatniks, and Italian-American restaurant goers alike used the emptied Chianti bottles, with their peasant straw fiaschi, from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, both as cheap drink, lighting, and decoration until the availability of better quality American and European wines changed their drinking habits.. In 2012, the little straw covered Chianti bottles, with their residue from the many hours of candlewax dripped down their sides, are available in second hand stores and online purchasing centers for those who keep a sentimental attachment to the decorative markers of their youth.
This particular bottle, date 1950, was purchased on e-Bay by just such a sentimentalist, a museum curator who remembered long hours spent in the 1960’s reading poetry with friends, discussing politics, and drinking cheap wine from bottles such as this one.
Among the first electronic mobile robots were the experimental machines of neuroscientist W. Grey Walter. Walter studied the brain’s electrical activity at the Burden Neurological Institute (BNI) near Bristol, England. His battery-powered robots were models to test his theory that a minimum number of brain cells can control complex behavior and choice. Soon after World War II, electronic motors and computers made possible such experimental robots that imitated living intelligence. Researchers like Walter then sought to answer a question that still occupies their successors: How close can machines come to human intelligence?
In the late 1940s Walter built his first model animals—simple, slow-moving, tortoise-shaped machines he named Elmer and Elsie. In 1951, Walter enlisted BNI engineer W. J. Warren to build the robot displayed here.
The machines are designed to explore their environment and react to it with two senses—sight and touch. A rotating photoelectric cell, the machine’s “eye,” scans the horizon continuously until it detects an external light. Scanning stops and the machine either moves toward the light source or, if the source is too bright, moves away. An external contact switch, sensitive to touch, causes the machine to retreat if it encounters obstacles. The robots retreat to a recharging station when their batteries were low.
Large, single-reeded circular dish with flat well scored around perimeter; no foot ring. Underside struck twice, partial and faint, with the lion-in-gateway touch mark of Thomas Danforth II. Three of four pseudo hallmarks are visible below (left to right), a lion's head erased, Britannia seated, and dagger or sword pointed up, all in pointed shields.
Maker is Thomas Danforth II of Middletown, CT; working 1755-1782.
The Copp Collection contains a variety of household objects that the Copp family of Connecticut used from around 1700 until the mid-1800s. Part of the Puritan Great Migration from England to Boston, the family eventually made their home in New London County, Connecticut, where their textiles, clothes, utensils, ceramics, books, bibles, and letters provide a vivid picture of daily life. More of the collection from the Division of Home and Community Life can be viewed by searching accession number 28810.
DC Comics published World’s Finest Comics issue No. 6 in the summer of 1942. Fred Ray illustrated the red white and blue cover that depicts Superman with his arm around a sailor, and Robin shaking the hand of a soldier. World War II era comics frequently promoted supporting the war effort and contained stories of comic book heroes aiding American soldiers and defeating the Axis enemies. This issue’s stories featured Superman in "Man of Steel Versus Man of Metal," Zatara in "Mystery of the Cat's Eye Spell," Drafty in "The Adventure of the Hungry Lion," The Sandman in "The Adventure of the Magic Forest," The Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy in "The Adventure of the King of Escape," Red, White and Blue in "The Case of the Little Fuehrer," Aquaman in "The Zoo of the Deep," Lando, Man of Magic in "The Black Gold Touch," and Batman and Robin in "The Secret of Bruce Wayne!"
Originally titled World’s Best Comics in its inaugural issue, DC Comics published World’s Finest Comics from 1941 until 1986. Each issue originally featured separate stories for Batman and Superman, but from issue 71 until issue 197 they appeared together in the same story. Over the years a cavalcade of DC heroes appeared in the book, including Robin, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Green Arrow, and the Vigilante.
MARKS: Crossed swords with a “K” between pommels in underglaze blue on the inside wall of the tankard (possibly the underglaze blue painter Johann David Kretschmar (1697-1765). On the pewter lid, three touches: swan, initials “CT”, and hallmark for 1708 (year last guild rules were adopted).
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1948.
This tankard is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a sharp image like the Chinese originals. The Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II was not satisfied with the inferior product. Success in underglaze blue painting eluded Böttger’s team until Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) appropriated a workable formula developed by the metallurgist David Köhler (1673-1723). Success required adjustment to the porcelain paste by replacing the alabaster flux with feldspar and adding a percentage of porcelain clay (kaolin) to the cobalt pigment. Underglaze blue painting became a reliable and substantial part of the manufactory’s output in the 1730s.
The flower painted on the tankard is a chrysanthemum, which for centuries has been associated with fall in Chinese culture, and carries many other symbolic and poetic meanings. Introduced to Japan from China in the Nara period (710-793) it was valued for its medicinal properties, and the flower came to represent immortality. In stylized form it is the official seal of the Imperial family. In Japan it is also associated with the sun because of its radial petals of gold and yellow hues. Chrysanthemums reached this continent in the colonial period.
The German pewter base and cover with its hinged ball thumbpiece has an engraved image of European origin featuring a man and a woman sitting under a tree in a pastoral setting.
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay or biscuit-fired surface it cannot be eradicated easily. Many of Meissen’s underglaze blue designs were, and still are, “pounced” onto the surface of the vessel before painting. Pouncing is a long used technique in which finely powdered charcoal or graphite is allowed to fall through small holes pierced through the outlines of a paper design, thereby serving as a guide for the painter and maintaining a relative standard in the component parts of Meissen table services.
On underglaze blue painting at Meissen see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 22-23.
J. Carswell, 1985, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its impact on the Western World.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 242-243.
MARKS: Crossed swords with dot and “K” in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1951.
This tray is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a clear image like the Chinese originals. The Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II was not satisfied with the inferior product. Success in underglaze blue painting eluded Böttger’s team until Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) appropriated a workable formula developed by the metallurgist David Köhler (1673-1723). Success required adjustment to the porcelain paste by replacing the alabaster flux with feldspar and adding a percentage of porcelain clay (kaolin) to the cobalt pigment. Underglaze blue painting became a reliable and substantial part of the manufactory’s output in the 1730s.
The “rock and bird” pattern seen in the center of the tray was adapted by the Meissen manufactory from Japanese porcelain models made in Arita. Japanese enamel painters on porcelain imitated Chinese designs, but also transformed them into a decorative style informed by Japanese painting schools. Several European porcelain manufactories then imitated Meissen’s imitation of the Japanese prototype of a flying bird and flowering tree beside a rock. Placed in symmetry around the "rock and bird" are butterflies and sprays of "Indian flowers" based on Japanese and Chinese motifs.
The corners of the tray are molded in a rocaille ornament, a European style of the mid-eighteenth century that referred, somewhat loosely at times, to natural forms like shells, rocks, flowing water, and foliage.
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay or biscuit-fired surface it cannot be eradicated easily. Many of Meissen’s underglaze blue designs were, and still are, “pounced” onto the surface of the vessel before painting. Pouncing is an ancient technique in which finely powdered charcoal or graphite is allowed to fall through small holes pierced through the outlines of a paper design, thereby serving as a guide for the painter and maintaining a relative standard in the component parts of Meissen table services.
On underglaze blue painting at Meissen see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 22-23.
J. Carswell, 1985, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its impact on the Western World.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 258-259.