“You must be this small to enter.” How many times do you hear that in the workplace?
This week, our historic operating machinery specialist, Tim Brewer, and I have been squeezing between tie-down cables and sliding around underneath R. Buckminster Fuller's "house of the future," the Dymaxion House. We were part of the original team that restored this unique prototype and built it inside Henry Ford Museum.
Now, for the first time since it opened in October 2001, we have closed the house to the public; this shutdown will be for as brief a time as possible - we promise! - but it is essential to ensure the long-term preservation of the structure. (In the meantime, you can still view the exhibit and the exterior of the house from the platform.)
So what exactly is happening to the Dymaxion House during this time?
This extraordinary structure really does hang from the mast, with a cabled hoop (“cage”) system that the exterior wall “skin” floats on. We are using laser-levels to assess the relative movement of components in the cage system.
In addition, the flooring system (or deck) is made of hollow aluminum “beams,” with plywood attached with clip strips of bent aluminum. Right now we are determining the extent of wear on the deck after 10 years of relatively trouble-free service.
As expected, we are finding more deterioration in the flooring path where visitors walk through the artifact, and we’ll be working hard over the next little while to repair any damages so our favorite house can delight the public for years to come. More details to come in a future post!
Senior Conservator Clara Deck has been a conservator at The Henry Ford for 20 years. Preserving the material integrity of the objects is her job - but making them look great is icing on the cake.Additional Readings:
- Dymaxion House
- Gauging the Condition of the Dymaxion House
- Dymaxion House
- Drawing, "The Dymaxion House at Henry Ford Museum," 2002
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, Henry Ford Museum, conservation, collections care, by Clara Deck, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller
On August 11, 1909, as his ship struggled off Cape Hatteras, telegraph operator Theodore Haubner had an urgent choice to make: How should he call for help?
Haubner worked the key on the commercial steamship S.S. Arapahoe. His ship had just broken her propeller shaft and was drifting off the North Carolina coast.
For years, ships in trouble had used the telegraph code “CQD,” which means “calling all stations—distress.” But a new code for distress had recently been agreed upon: “SOS.” Would anyone recognize it?
Deciding to split the difference, Haubner signaled SOS as well as CQD—and his ship was picked up just twelve hours later.
Haubner had sent the world’s first SOS signal. He later donated his headphones and telegraph key to The Henry Ford, where they are now on exhibit in our Driving America exhibit.
Wireless telegraphy, perfected only a decade earlier by inventor and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi, used radio waves to connect ships with one another as well as with stations on land. In 1904, CQD was adopted by Marconi Company wireless telegraph operators as their emergency signal.
But an international industry would need an internationally standardized emergency signal. At the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Berlin, in 1906, participants agreed on SOS as the international distress signal. They chose SOS not because it was an abbreviation for any particular distress call (it does not stand for “save our ship,” as many have thought), but because it was easy to send and receive - three dots, three dashes, three dots. When the Arapahoe was drifting, the signal was just coming into use.
So why are these telegraph artifacts in an exhibit on cars?
When Haubner sent that first SOS in 1909, American culture was adjusting to a feeling of new, wider horizons. Wireless telegraphy was one of many technological marvels making their way into culture and, more slowly, into everyday life. Another of those marvels was the automobile.
Driving America puts cars into the context of these new visions of the future - this optimism that new technology, standardized across the world, could do anything.
Saving a ship was only the beginning.
Suzanne Fischer is the Associate Curator of Technology at The Henry Ford. She typed this post on an 1880s index typewriter and sent it to the blog editor via telex.
North Carolina, telegraphy, technology, Henry Ford Museum, Driving America, communication, by Suzanne Fischer, 20th century, 1900s
What does lounging by the pool on a hot day have to do with automotive restoration?
In the case of one of our antique vehicles, more than you think!
Early tires for automotive vehicles were made of natural rubber and were made in one piece - somewhat like a heavily reinforced inner tube. These tires are often referred to as "tube tires," and some of the more common sizes are still produced by specialty suppliers.
But not all sizes are still made, or even available - and this was the case recently with our department’s restoration of the 1899 Duryea Trap for the new Driving America exhibition.
This vehicle came to our labs as an older restoration that dated from the 1930s. It arrived in fairly poor condition, with seized corroded metal components, flaking paint, moth-eaten upholstery and the clincher: heavily degraded tires.
The artifact could not be put on display without tires, as a guest would likely focus on their absence and therefore miss the aesthetic beauty of this early horseless carriage
So what to do?
Believe it or not, it became a constant source of unending debate as to how to proceed, what materials to use...until - eureka!!
Summer was in full swing and with it came lounging by the pool. Our head of preservation, Mary Fahey, came to me with the observation that a common foam pool noodle had the right diameter for the tires we needed. So we thought, why not? We could make that work...after all, the vehicle would never need to run, as it was far too precious an object to risk the damage that a restoration of that extent - and its subsequent running - would cause. It didn’t even really need to roll, as we usually do not let vehicles with original tires touch the ground anyway! It was doable.
So we gathered up a few dollar store pool noodles as the base for our new tires and put them through a fairly extensive process, which involved strengthening them through multiple coatings of various flexible putties and a central reinforcing. This process produced the results that you now see.
We only hope that now that you know the full story - and what’s behind what appears to be a natural rubber tube tire - that you won’t focus too much on them and still consider the overall beauty of this precious artifact.
Robert Coyle is a transportation conservation specialist for The Henry Ford.
by Robert Coyle, conservation, collections care, cars, Henry Ford Museum, Driving America
The coming of a New Year is a great time to set resolutions, and for 2012, The Henry Ford has picked at least one doozy that we are very excited to share!
Over the course of the year, we will be digitizing our most “significant” icons in each of the core categories in our collections — and making those available on our collections website to anyone who is interested.
So what does that mean, and why are we so delighted about it?
Digitization is the process of making photos and information about the collections of The Henry Ford available online. In a way, this is a process that dates back to the founding of the institution, as artifacts have been catalogued and photographed over the years for internal purposes.
However, the information and images we’ve gathered and the ways in which we’ve stored those for our own usage don’t necessarily equate to the robust web presentation that we want to share with the world— so we have been spending a lot of time updating and standardizing catalog records, taking great new photographs of the collection, and writing brief narratives on the purpose and meaning of each object.
This is all part of a big project we’ve been calling CAN-DO: Collections Access Network for Digital Objects.
We really got going in earnest with this effort in 2011, with the bulk of the objects digitized either in or related to the new Driving America exhibit, which opens at the end of January. The Henry Ford obviously has very strong transportation collections, and this means that right now our digitized collections contain everything from the very rare and beautiful Bugatti...
...to an iconic Charles Sheeler photograph of the Ford Rouge plant in the late 1920s...
…and everything in between.
As 2011 began winding down, we started to think about what we would digitize in 2012. The Henry Ford has an embarrassment of riches in its collections, including hundreds of thousands of 3D objects and about 25 million 2D artifacts housed in the Benson Ford Research Center. Digitizing it all will be a multi-year, if not multi-decade, effort. What, we asked ourselves, should be our focus in 2012?
The answer was obvious: We need to make sure the public has digital access to the most “significant” artifacts at The Henry Ford. I put the term “significant” in quotation marks purposely, as significance has multiple meanings. Few could argue that an artifact like the city bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is not a significant historical object. It is also institutionally unique. Many museums have civil rights artifacts, but there is only one Rosa Parks bus, and the only place to find it is at The Henry Ford.
The other dimension of “significance” is personal resonance. Certainly the Rosa Parks bus has personal significance for many people. But there’s also a pretty hefty degree to which personal significance diverges. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily expect this Buck Rogers poster to have personal significance for a large percentage of the public.
For me, though, this happens to be one of my very favorite collections objects that we’ve digitized thus far. It features a space pterodactyl, a disintegrator ray, rocketships, and many spacemen in dapper outfits, all illustrated with bright colors and fantastic graphic detail. These all happen to be things that I enjoy (space pterodactyls being a new but noteworthy addition to the list), so to me, this is particularly interesting.
We’ve been having a lot of interesting conversations about all the aspects of “significance” and how they relate to the collections of The Henry Ford, and have started throwing out ideas and making lists. Over the course of 2012, you will see these objects begin to show up on our collections website, but you’ll also hear about them in other ways — via blog posts from staff members, in the curators’ Pics of the Month and any other ways we can think of to share the stories that these objects tell.
We could not be more excited to start this project, and hope you are excited about it as well. Check our collections website frequently to visit your old favorites from the collections and discover new ones!
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, which she thinks is quite possibly the coolest job ever — even if it’s a hazard of the job that her favorite collections object changes about 10 times a day.
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization, digital collections
Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary co-founder, passed away yesterday, and the web is filled with an astounding outpouring of respect and gratitude for his work. It’s a testament to the impact personal technology – mass-produced consumer products – can have on people’s lives.
At The Henry Ford, we document not only the work of innovators, but the ways people use technology in their everyday lives. We collect artifacts that by their physicality and tangibility, their heft and their look, connect visitors to history and the lives of the people who used them. The Apple products in our collection – including an Apple IIe, a Lisa, a Macintosh, an iMac, an iPod and an iPhone – were used by ordinary people to write, teach, do business, play games, listen to music and connect to each other. Jobs’ product genius was in making those activities easy, transparent and fun – and in making the products highly desirable.
In the early 1980s, with Jobs at Apple’s helm, the company popularized the mouse and “graphic user interface” – the cheerful icons and desktop and folder metaphors that we still use in everyday computing. These innovations made computing accessible to everybody, not only people who could code. Over at our OnInnovation site, Steve Wozniak, Apple’s brilliant engineer co-founder, talks about how making computing fun and easy was the company’s goal from the beginning.
Jobs famously described the company as located at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. He infused a respect for creativity, intelligence and design into the company’s products – integrating color graphics quite early, for instance, and making one of his own passions, music, the key to a new kind of product, the digital music player.
The products Apple made under Jobs were never cheap. They were aspirational consumer goods that promised to make your life better, to make you a cool nonconformist, to make you “think different.” Did they? Maybe and maybe not, but Jobs’ legacy reminds us that our tools can change not only the way we live our lives, but the way we think about ourselves.
Suzanne Fischer is former Curator of Technology at The Henry Ford.
20th century, 21st century, 2010s, technology, music, in memoriam, computers, communication, by Suzanne Fischer
As a precursor to the school year, we took a visit to the one-room schoolhouses at Greenfield Village. And well, I think the thought of a summer being over was a little overwhelming for certain members of my crew.
We spent some time inside the McGuffey Schoolhouse, erected in 1934 by Henry Ford to honor William Holmes McGuffey. It’s built from logs taken from the Pennsylvania farm at which McGuffey was born in 1800. The McGuffey Eclectic Reader series of texts were commonly used in schoolhouses across the United States. Our nine-year-old Henry eagerly stood at the teacher’s podium and began to lecture his five-year-old sister on the Civil War. I attempted to explain to him that the Civil War hadn’t even occurred at the time the readers were written. Chronology wasn’t going to slow him down.
When we looked inside the Miller and Scotch Settlement schoolhouses--school’s Henry Ford attended in the 1870s--I have to be honest, I yearned for a little bit of their simplicity.
Blank walls.
A clean slate.
No clutter, wires, smart boards, website passwords, Internet policies, consent forms, security doors, and bins of paper waiting to be recycled. Don’t get me wrong, I think technology is great and a welcome result of much of the innovation showcased at The Henry Ford. But I can also say, one of things I like best about Greenfield Village is how a visit transports you to simpler times. And I’m sure that many parents who have been presented with the infamous “school supply list” and navigated through back-to-school shopping mayhem, might just agree with me and find themselves (at least occasionally) hankerin’ for the bare walls those 1800s school houses.
Henry Ford moved the Scotch Settlement Schoolhouse, and the home of his favorite teacher, John Chapman, to Greenfield Village in 1934. When Ford was nine, Chapman left the Scotch Settlement Schoolhouse and went to teach at the Miller Schoolhouse, Henry Ford transferred and remained Chapman’s student until he was 15. (Built at Greenfield Village in 1943, the Miller Schoolhouse is an accurate a replica of the original building.)
The Scotch Settlement and Miller Schoolhouses remind me of the schoolhouse on the 1970s television show “Little House on the Prairie.” I remember visiting the schoolhouses at Greenfield Village as a girl and pretending with my older sister. I was always (appropriately) outspoken, freckly and big-toothed Laura. She was beautiful Mary. I remember hoping my parents would just leave me so I could imagine all the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories I had read and the sentimental NBC/Michael Landon versions I patiently waited for each week. Oh how I yearned for one of those bonnets. (Which, by the way, are for sale in the gift shops!)
Students used to walk several miles to school each day since the one-room schools were in rural communities. (You can tell your parents that there is no evidence that the route was uphill both ways.) If children arrived early, they could play with their friends until their long school day started. Students of all ages shared that one room with girls on one side and boys on the other. They learned arithmetic, spelling, geography, music, history and art, and older children were assigned necessary chores like washing blackboards, preparing firewood and clearing snow.
Children shared books and brought books from home. Books like the McGuffey Eclectic Reader and the Webster’s Blue Back Speller were passed from generation to generation. The main focus in education at the time though was proper moral training and character development.
school, Scotch Settlement School, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, education, childhood
Reflecting on the Emancipation Proclamation's Visit to Henry Ford Museum
Earlier this week, we had the wonderful opportunity to host a most historic document: the Emancipation Proclamation.
This document, which was issued and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, formally proclaimed freedom for all slaves and invited black men to join the Union Army and Navy, resulting in the enlistment of approximately 200,000 freed slaves and free black people before the Civil War's end. (For more details on the document, and why it can only be displayed for 36 hours at a time, check out the National Archives' Prologue blog post on the Emancipation Proclamation's visit to our museum.)
As word spread about the document's visit, the excitement and anticipation began to build across the Metro Detroit area - and when it was all said and done, an astonishing 21,015 people streamed past this historic document at Henry Ford Museum in 36 hours.
Just before the Emancipation Proclamation was made available for public viewing, our opening ceremony welcomed visitors and set the stage for this exciting event with remarks by our chairman of the board, Evan Weiner; our president, Patricia Mooradian; and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon Keith, whose maternal and paternal grandparents were slaves.
Afterwards, groups like the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit performed both solemn and rousing gospel songs for the rapidly-growing crowd.
The wait to see this historic document was long at times - up to eight hours - but most guests remained in high spirits, enjoying the performances on the stage near the exhibit, participating in hands-on activities like "enlisting" in the Army or taking breaks to check out artifacts throughout the museum, which was also completely open and free of charge during this timeframe.
And an honor guard - comprised of the Headquarters Guard, 5th U.S. Colored Troops, Company C and 102nd U.S. Colored Troops - stood at rapt attention near the document at all times.
Once again, we wish to send a huge thank you to everyone who turned out to see this important part of American history. We were truly honored to be able to host the Emancipation Proclamation, and humbled to see the response by our fellow Metro Detroiters. This was an experience we'll never forget, and we hope you won't, either!
Civil War, presidents, Abraham Lincoln, events, Henry Ford Museum, African American history
Over the last couple of weeks, our Firestone Farm team began plowing, harrowing and planting in our cornfield, which is adjacent to William Ford Barn.
At Firestone Farm, we use a spring-tooth and spike-tooth harrow after plowing. Plowing is the first step in the process and turns over the dirt, bringing new soil to the ground’s surface; however, it also leaves the ground very uneven, almost like waves on a choppy lake. Harrowing breaks up clods of dirt, knocks down high ridges and fills in troughs (called furrows) until the ground is smooth enough to start planting.
Next came the planting. We planted a very old variety of corn, called Reid’s Yellow Dent, which was used by farmers all over the United States in the late 1800s. The corn is planted by hand using a tool called a corn jabber.
A piece of twine with knots every three feet is stretched across the field. Two farmers work their way towards the middle of the field, planting corn wherever there is a knot in the twine.
When they meet in the middle, Firestone farmers give each other a friendly handshake—a Greenfield Village tradition and a sign of camaraderie in hopes of a good crop yield.
Spacing the corn three feet apart will allow Firestone farmers to take a horse with a special tool called a cultivator in between each row to remove weeds. Later, farmers will plant pumpkins alongside their corn; the pumpkin vines will spread all over the ground and help keep weeds under control.
Be sure to stop by and watch the corn’s progress each week!
farming equipment, Greenfield Village, farms and farming, agriculture
Guide to the Gardens at Greenfield Village's Historic Homes
Spring has finally arrived at Greenfield Village!
While this gives us many causes for celebration – including the Village’s re-opening – one of my favorite elements of the season is watching the gardens in our historic homes grow.
We have a wide variety of crops that grow in many different styles of gardens throughout Greenfield Village – and of course, all are cultivated according to that particular home’s geographic location and time period.
Let’s take a walk through the gardens!
Daggett Garden (built in 1754 in Andover, Connecticut)
At Daggett, we show a very traditional way to garden. The word garden means “to guard in”--just as you guard something in with a fence, you guarded in your crops. In crowded European cities, where the American colonists came from, you’d see them growing their crops in tiers and boxed beds because the cities were crowded and you had to maximize the amount of crops you got from each square foot of gardening.
This is another location with raised beds, which were just rebuilt last year; we grow a variety of vegetables, herbs, flowers and even concord grapes – and just look at how big the cabbages we grow can get!
Susquehanna Plantation (built circa 1835 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland)
At this home’s original location, tobacco was the crop that the enslaved African Americans would have tended and grown. Growing tobacco was back-breaking work. Henry and Elizabeth Carroll enjoyed a very prosperous life from selling this tobacco; in 1860 alone, Carroll sold over 10,000 tons of the crop. Today, you can still see the same variety of tobacco grown in the fields surrounding the plantation, although it doesn’t grow quite as well here in the North.
We start the plants early in what’s called a cold frame because the growing season for tobacco is quite long – more than 140 days. In the 19th century, tobacco plants were started in protected seed beds, and then transplanted into hills in the fields. It was not uncommon to plant lettuce along with the tobacco seeds in the seed beds to act as a buffer, and to draw leaf-mulching insects away. Notice how the tobacco is being grown here, in a mound almost three feet high; to do this, you stick your foot in the mound, hoe up the soil up to your knee, pull out your foot, and then put the plant into the ground with your whole fist. From there, you have to keep mounding up and up.
When the time is right, the entire top of the plant is pinched off to prevent it from going to seed and ending its growing cycle too soon. This will cause the plant to try and replace its top with a lot of small shoots called suckers, so this is when the process of “suckering” begins: taking off the smaller leaves so that only a few leaves (about 12-14) will get really big instead.
With open pollinated heirloom varieties, such as we use, you always save the seed and grow your crops again next year – this way, you maintain an original variety of the plant, and as a bonus, you don’t have to buy new seeds each year!
Mattox Garden (built about 1880 in Bryan County, Georgia)
Here, we grow okra – specifically, Georgia Jade okra, an heirloom variety that actually grows very well here in Michigan. You’d be surprised by the abundance of okra you can get, even in such a contrasting growing location.
To do this, we work a good mulch right into the beds, which helps the water stays within the bed itself; it doesn’t run off and evaporate as much as it does when you have row crops.
We also grow everything from yellow bantam corn, radishes, Muscadine and Scuppernong grapes, tomatoes and collard, mustard and turnip greens. With corn, tomatoes and okra, you can mix that with a rice dish, throw in a ham hock – and you have yourself all different kinds of gumbos and jambalayas. That was very typical Southern cuisine.
(For another example of a classic Southern dish, watch our video here on how to make Hoppin’ John, from our cooking demonstrations during Celebrate Black History! in Henry Ford Museum.)
Firestone Farm (built in 1828 in Columbiana, Ohio)
Although the Firestone home was built in 1828, we show life as it was lived at this farm in the 1880s – and that means vegetables planted in neat rows in the kitchen garden.
Most of our crops are directly sown and include a number of different pole and bush bean varieties. Dry beans were an important part of the winter stores as they would keep and could be used in a number of ways.
We also have quite an assortment of fruit trees at Firestone Farm, with the most important being the apples that grow both in our small orchard and in the back yard of the farmhouse. Some types of apples kept all the way into the spring months, and others were dried, made into apple sauce, and apple butter. Cider is also really important, but not the sweet kind we all drink in the fall.
We also grow citron melons at Firestone Farm; these look like little watermelons but are white inside – when you candy these (by cooking the rinds in a sugar syrup), you can put these into stone breads and a lot of holiday baked goods.
Dr. Howard’s Medicinal Garden (built about 1840 in Tekonsha, Michigan)
When we re-opened this building to visitors, we did a lot of research – which was easy to do, as there were a lot of original papers from Dr. Howard himself and even barrels and medicines that he used. He would pay young people to go out into the woods, pick herbs and bring them back to him to use in his medicines.
The plants we grow there are the plants that we have documented that Dr. Howard grew and picked from the woods out in what is now known as Tekonsha, Michigan (in the extreme southwest corner of Michigan, about 10 miles south of Marshall, Michigan).
Ford Home (built in 1861 in Springwells Township, Michigan)
As with several of our gardens, we have wonderful concord grapes that we grow at Henry Ford’s birthplace, alongside parsnips, brandywine and yellow pear tomatoes and different varieties of squash.
Several of these older and almost forgotten varieties of crops are starting to become popular again, and it always makes me feel good when I go to my local grocery store and see something that we grow at the Ford Home, like Hubbard Squash. I have a feeling someday those pear tomatoes will be in your Kroger store because they are just so good.
Clara Ford’s Garden of the Leavened Heart (built in 1929 in Greenfield Village)
While the gardens at our historic homes are tended by our trained historic presenters, we also have several other gardens that are tended by our Village Herbal Associates, a very strong group of volunteers that cultivate the Dr. Howard Garden, Clara Ford’s Garden of the Leavened Heart and the Burbank Production Garden; they then sell their products at the Farmer’s Market that we have each fall in Greenfield Village.
Henry Ford’s wife, Clara, was instrumental in putting this particular garden together. She didn’t have much to do with all of Greenfield Village, but Clara had that garden. It has Victorian pathways and very pretty shapes – in fact, if you look closely, you can see four arrows and four hearts; when you put them together, they make a complete circle that you can walk around.
So the next time you visit, make sure to take a few moments to look at the many varied gardens growing throughout Greenfield Village – what other elements have you noticed about each home’s garden? What similarities do you see with today’s gardening practices? What kinds of differences do you see?
Michigan, Dr. Howard's Office, food, Daggett Farmhouse, farms and farming, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, gardening
Thirty years ago today, Ronald Reagan - 40th president of the United States - survived an assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr.
One of his Secret Service agents, Jerry Parr, recently filmed a segment with CNN inside Henry Ford Museum, recounting the terrifying events of that day while exploring the presidential limousine that carried them both to the hospital immediately after the shots were fired.
Today, you can see this vehicle on display inside Henry Ford Museum; due to security restrictions, it is the last of the presidential limousines that will ever be preserved (all others are now destroyed).
A few interesting facts about the vehicle itself include:
For more background on this historic event, USA Today published an article by Mr. Parr describing what happened after the shots were fired (including their ride to the hospital in the limousine), and CNN.com also has a gallery of rarely-seen photographs from the attack.
Where were you when you heard that President Reagan had been shot? What do you remember most from that day?
Additional Readings:
- 1912 Baker Electric Victoria: Transportation for Five First Ladies
- Building a Presidential Vehicle
- Rawhide Cool
- The Henry Ford at Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance
Washington DC, 21st century, 2010s, 20th century, 1980s, presidents, presidential vehicles, limousines, Henry Ford Museum, convertibles, cars
