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. |
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Selected Objects |
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Carrier Centrifugal Refrigeration Compressor
The first successful mechanical refrigeration equipment was patented soon after the Civil War, but the large size and high cost of these early machines restricted their use to industrial processes. ...
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Cladding Fragment from the World Trade Center
This crumpled piece of exterior sheathing was recovered from the debris pile of the World Trade Center after the building collapsed following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While ...
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Factory Gates
This pair of iron gates from the 1870s hung in the Dobson textile mill in Philadelphia, Penn., until 1991.
In the late 18th century most workers were farmers ...
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H. M. Wood Windmill Patent Model
During most of the 19th century, the U.S. Patent Office required inventors seeking patent protection to submit both a written application and a three-dimensional model. This wood and metal patent ...
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Hart House Architectual Elements from Ipswich, Mass.
The largest artifact in the museum, this Georgian-style, 2 ½-story timber-framed house was built in the 1760s and stood at 16 Elm Street in the center of Ipswich, Massachusetts, until ...
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La Libreria a Venise
Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), known as Canaletto, etched this view of Venice featuring the Library of St. Mark and the Piazzetta in the 1740s. The Library was designed by Jacopo ...
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Model of Bucyrus-Erie Stripping Shovel
In 1960, the Bucyrus-Erie Company of South Milwaukee, Wisc., presented this 14-inch-high, scale model of what was to become the world's largest stripping shovel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Later ...
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Niagara Falls Original Turbines
Using this extremely fine wood model as part of its technical proposal, the Swiss firm Faesch & Piccard won the contract to design the original turbines for the Niagara Falls ...
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Route 66 Pavement, 1932
The nation's first network of highways, built in the late 1920s and 1930s, created new opportunities for motorists and small business owners. It also created a perception that highways benefited ...
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Wye Level
The Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through Central America. The idea of a waterway of this sort had been raised many times since Columbus's first voyage to ...
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Yankee Stadium Ticket Booth
This 1923 ticket booth is from Yankee Stadium, called "The House that Ruth Built" because the star slugger, Babe Ruth (1895–1948), revitalized the game, bringing in thousands of new fans.
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Related Items from the Archives Center |
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Industrial Archeology
The Archives Center is the official repository of the records of the Society for Industrial Archeology.
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Cass Gilbert Collection, 1897-1936
The Arkansas state capitol was one of many major public buildings designed by the renowned architect Cass Gilbert. This collection includes photographs of many of these projects as well as sketchbooks created during his travels in Europe.
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