Helen FieldsScience Writer

The other day I was having lunch with a newly-laid-off friend, and after lunch she suggested we go visit the Jefferson Bible at the National Museum of American History. This is the excellent thing about not having a “regular” job – and certainly a joy of being laid off – you can design your schedule around long lunches and middle-of-the-day museum visits.

Now, I had no idea what the Jefferson Bible was. I assumed it was just a Bible owned by Thomas Jefferson. But no, Thomas Jefferson was more radical than that. He took passages from the first four books of the New Testament and pasted them together in an assemblage he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” So he skipped the bits he considered later additions, like the miracles, and stuck to Jesus’s life and teachings.

Look closely – this is literal cutting and pasting. He actually cut up books in four languages to make it. Each column is a different language. From left to right, that’s Greek, Latin, French, and English.

The two books in the back of this next picture are the two English-language Bibles he cut his passages out of.

Jefferson didn’t intend this for publication, but the Government Printing Office published a facsimile in 1904; that’s one in front. Until the 1950s, when copies ran out, newly elected senators were given a copy like this one.

The museum explains this book as part of Jefferson’s general Enlightenment-era revolutionariness. This is the guy who drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all, and why stop with the monarchy? He was a fan of Jesus, but he questioned the way he’d been portrayed.The book is on display now because the museum finished a big conservation project on it last year. (This was a book for private study, not a book to last through the ages; the 18th-century glue and the many kinds of paper and ink made it a special challenge.)

You can read the book for yourself on the American History website.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I was in Southern California in October for a wedding – something that seems to happen every six months or so – and took advantage of a friend of a friend who works at the California Science Center to get a bit of a tour. The California Science Center is in the process of remaking itself. It used to be the California Museum of Science and Industry and now it has a shiny big building with lots of windows.

There’s a big emphasis on things you can try out yourself, like a nifty display case that shows the different ways that seeds or other bits of biological material can disperse to islands. (It used ping pong balls and levers and stuff. Really pretty fun.) Even before you go inside, in the parking lot, you get some real hands-on experience of a simple machine, by lifting this real live truck:

Obviously, as a reasonably-informed adult, and one who successfully completed the unit on simple machines in third grade, I know that you get more out of a lever the farther you are from the fulcrum, but boy, it takes on new meaning when you use it to lift a truck. (Note the actual space between the tires and the pavement.)

The museum has a lovely trio of space ships:

From left to right, a whole swath of space history: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. That Mercury capsule is the very one that Ham the chimpanzee rode in on January 31, 1961. The Apollo capsule flew in 1975, which was after the moon landings were done; its main claim to fame is that it docked with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. All three are on loan from the National Air and Space Museum. I wonder how many of these things the Smithsonian owns, and where they all live.

The Science Center has a huuuge exhibit on ecosystems (which is kind of tucked away and easy to miss – a shame, because it’s like 75% of the museum). I particularly enjoyed a room about polar research. It’s kept extra-chilly and there’s a wall of ice where you can feel how well different insulating materials work:

They have a mitt made of fur, one stuffed with down, and so on, so you can see which one feels warmest. I can’t remember anymore, but I had fun poking the wall of ice. In the neighboring desert room I was amused to see a display on Katy Hinman, a former bat researcher who I was distantly acquainted with in college.

One of the most striking things in the museum was in the L.A. section of the Ecosystems exhibit. An artist took glass plates, put stencils on them, and left them outside on roofs in Los Angeles for one month. Here’s what happened.

And that, my friends, is just how much particulate pollution falls out of the air in Los Angeles. Makes you never want to breathe there again, doesn’t it?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I was in the National Museum of Natural History on Sunday–love that place–and couldn’t resist new pictures of the elephant. I know, this isn’t my first blog post about that elephant, but he’s just so cool-looking. And I wanted to try out my new camera.

When I was a kid, the elephant stood on a round platform in the middle of the rotunda, but now it has this more natural-looking home. I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out when that renovation happened (vague guess: 15 years ago?) and was unsuccessful, but I did learn a bit more about the history of the museum. The museum opened a little over 100 years ago, and it had a lot of art then, mostly in what is now the Ocean Hall. Odd, huh, for a natural history museum? The art is over at the American Art Museum now, but here’s a nice post about how art inspired taxidermy.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Bet you didn’t know this museum existed: The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. It’s right across the street from the National Herb Garden and a short walk from the National Boxwood Collection and the National Grove of State Trees. They’re all part of the National Arboretum, one of Washington’s real hidden gems. It’s on New York Avenue, a road that wants to be a highway, lined mostly by motels and unattractive semi-industrial-looking sites. But behind its fence is this lovely, green refuge you would never imagine.

The museum started in 1976, when a bunch of Japanese bonsai growers donated trees to the U.S. as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. This was one of the original gifts, and it’s the oldest tree in the collection:

This Japanese white pine has been “in training,” the label says, since 1625. 1625! It was passed down through generations of the Yamaki family, who had a bonsai nursery in Hiroshima. Their nursery was less than two miles from where the atomic bomb went off, but the Yamaki family and their trees avoided major injury. Here’s a nice article about the tree from the National Bonsai Federation.

Normally I think that tree is displayed with a less distracting background, but in winter they collect all the bonsai and penjing (the Chinese version of bonsai) in one pavilion and put a temporary roof on it. Since everything outdoors was covered with a hard, thin crust of ice yesterday, this decision seems to make a lot of sense. These trees are from temperate environments, so they need shorter days and cooler temperatures for part of the year, but that doesn’t mean they need East Coast-style ice storms. “Greetings, venerable pine! We hope you don’t mind if we hang 16 pounds of ice on your perfectly shaped branches!”

Those branches don’t perfectly shape themselves. Here’s a European Hornbeam having its twigs molded:

This plant is a bit younger–an upstart, really, compared to the Yamaki pine. It’s only been in training since 1972. The bonsai collection has been supplemented over the years by donations from bonsai enthusiasts, including a gorgeous Japanese white pine given by King Hassan the 2nd of Morocco. I don’t know if he was a bonsai grower, but he apparently owned at least one.

It’s cool to see all these plants in winter. It also made me want to go back to see them when they bloom and leaf out in the spring. Just think of the years, decades, and centuries of loving care that go into making and maintaining these perfect indoor representations of outdoor life.

Bonsai appeal to my sense of cuteness. You expect to see little fairies dancing on the moss under the trees. We’ll have to settle for this guy, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Mission San Juan Capistrano is one of the many missions scattered along California’s coast. They were established by Spanish Franciscans in the late 18th and early 19th century. You know, the Franciscans, as in San Francisco. (Which has a lovely mission.) The missions brought Christianity to the native peoples and were Spain’s military outposts, too.

Mission San Juan Capistrano was founded in 1776. It has the oldest building in California, a little chapel where Father Junipero Serra himself celebrated mass. I know he’s a big deal because he has a road named after him in the Bay Area. (He was born in Spain and died in California, where he founded a bunch of missions.)

I went to the mission a few weeks ago because I was in Orange County for a wedding, and this is pretty much what you do to kill time in that part of Orange County.

Mission San Juan Capistrano is most famous, I am told, for the song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” There’s these swallows that come back to the mission every summer to nest and a guy wrote a song about it, in like the 30s or something. (I’m sorry, my history skills are particularly weak today.) The piano he composed on made it to the mission and is part of the displays now.

The swallows have a festival and everything. I’ve been to the mission twice now (this was not my first Orange County wedding) and have yet to see a swallow. It’s possible it was the wrong time of year, but I also hear that the swallows don’t really hang out there anymore. Maybe with all the development around there, they have other options for places to hang their hats. Nests. Whatever.

I was cynically suspicious that the nests were fake. But at least now you know what a cliff swallow nest looks like.

There’s plenty of real living things on the grounds, though. Check out these pretty flowers:

And I was much obliged to this lizard for posing, unlike all the other jerky lizards I saw around the mission:

There you go. A church museum. (They also have proper museum exhibits but I was more inspired by the outdoors this time.)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Last Monday I went for a day hike at the Grand Canyon and stopped by the visitor center on the South Rim. And I thought, hey, this is totally a museum! Sweet! Ok, it is quite a thin museum. There is more open space than stuff, and I think people mainly go in there to ask the rangers questions.

But still, there was enough to make a Museum Tourist post, because check this out. It’s a boat.

Nowadays, people go down the Colorado River on inflatable rafts, often motorized. The first people to run the river did it in 1869, led by a one-armed Civil War veteran. This boat is from much later, the 1930s; like Powells’ boats, it was custom-made for the Grand Canyon. (Unlike Powell’s team, the people who built this boat actually knew what they were getting into.) This boat, the WEN, was built in the 1930s to run the Grand Canyon’s rapids. It was part of what made taking people down the Grand Canyon on a boat into a viable commercial enterprise.

Enough about boats. Here’s what you see if you walk about 5 minutes from the visitor center:

And here is what you see if you take a bus about 10 minutes from the visitor center and walk downhill for an hour:

And if you keep going half an hour beyond that, and you look another couple thousand feet down, or if you squint very closely at this picture, you see: the river.

It’s the brown thing right down at the bottom of the canyon. See? I brought it back to boats.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

You know how I was talking about the Victoria and Albert Museum and how it’s really big? You know what else is really big? The British Museum. I don’t know, the V&A might be bigger. But the British Museum is just out of control. Like, oh, yeah, mummies? We got yer mummies. And stuff from the Parthenon. And, oh right, the freakin’ Rosetta Stone.

This is what it’s like in front of the Rosetta Stone on a rainy day during the August school holidays. Fortunately, it’s not always quite that crowded, plus I managed to worm my way to the front later in the afternoon, so here’s a little corner of the Rosetta Stone from the front:

That’s a bit of the Greek section. As probably everyone knows, the Rosetta Stone was the key that let Egyptologists finally decipher hieroglyphics, because it has the same text written on three times. It’s in hieroglyphics at the top, in the script used day to day by Ancient Egyptians in the middle, and in Ancient Greek at the bottom. It was discovered by a French soldier in 1799 and ended up in British hands a few years later through something to do with the Napoleonic Wars.

The Rosetta Stone is one of many artifacts at the British Museum that other countries (in this case, Egypt) would like to have back, thank you very much. I found it interesting to see how the museum handled the issue in labels. Like this, on the marbles brought back by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon: “Elgin’s removal of the sculptures from the ruins of the building has always been a matter for discussion, but one thing is certain – his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution.”

So, here’s one of those Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon:

Those Greeks knew how to make something nice out of a chunk of rock, didn’t they? This horse, the website tells me, pulled the chariot of Selene, the moon goddess. It looks so tired because it’s been working all night. The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 B.C. It’s been rebuilt now – I visited the Acropolis (that’s the name of the hill the Parthenon stands on) in 1998. It was one of the oddest places I’ve been. You’re walking around on marble, but it’s marble that’s been worn into smooth, slippery waves, so you have to watch your feet. Especially with the very hot and strong winds that were blowing across the top of the hill.

Here’s the other thing I remember about the Acropolis:

That’s a real live 1998-era Greek cat, lying in my backpack.

There were no cats at the British Museum, at least none that are still alive. (There were definitely cat mummies.) And it’s so massive, there’s no way to cover it in one blog post. I’ll write more later. Probably. Unless the massiveness just overwhelms me and I give up.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The Victoria & Albert Museum calls itself “The world’s greatest museum of art and design.” I must say, I don’t have the expertise to judge the superlative, but wow, they have a lot of cool stuff there. I got the sense you could wander it for weeks and still miss a lot of the collection. I only had a few hours, and in the last half hour before the museum closed, I was still discovering vast swaths that I hadn’t realized were there. So here’s the tiniest glimpse at their collection.

The V&A’s jewelry collection is amazing, but two things impressed me the most. First, the cast iron jewelry from 19th-century Germany. (Actually Prussia, I think.) Who knew you could make cast-iron jewelry? Well, you can. It’s black, like you’d think, but quite delicate. The other thing I thought was totally cool was the chatelaine.

I knew that chatelaine was a word, but I think I thought it had something to do with chattel. (And I’m not totally sure I knew what chattel meant; the meaning I was thinking of, slave, is archaic.) But it’s actually the feminine version of chatelain, the keeper of a castle. And it has a second meaning: this thing.

Women’s clothes weren’t always made with pockets, but that doesn’t mean women didn’t carry things around. They had one of these, a sort of ornamental chain worn at the waist with useful stuff hanging off of it, like keys and scissors. This one was made of cut steel around 1850 in London.

Seriously, the museum goes on and on and on. Somewhere in the back of a set of galleries is this bed:

But, oh no, it’s not just any bed. It’s The Great Bed of Ware. Haven’t heard of it? Well, that just proves you aren’t living in 16th century Britain. It was so famous, it made an appearance in Twelfth Night:

…and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of
paper, although the sheet were big enough for the
bed of Ware in England, set ‘em down: go, about it.

A traveler first wrote about it in 1596 in an inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire. The real textiles didn’t survive; these hangings and bed coverings are based on other textiles of the time.

The museum is truly mind-blowingly ginormous. Here’s a room of 20th-century design:

Note that the upper reaches of the room hold part of the library’s collection.

And then there’s large quantities of sculpture. And that huge wall thing at the end of this gallery used to be in a church, although I completely failed to collect any information about it.

I mean, I have a little information – it’s a choir screen, which goes between the part of the church where the congregation hangs out and the part where the action happens. They used to be common, and now they’re less common, if I remember correctly from the label. They’ve been taken out of a lot of churches, including whatever church that one used to be in, and some ended up at the V&A.

Including the one in this picture:

What’s that? You say the choir screen isn’t the most noticeable thing in that picture? Yeah. That blue-green thing is a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that hangs in the big main entranceway thingy. I think “Dale Chihuly” is a good bet whenever you see a swoopy monumental piece of glass sculpture.

I was at the V&A for a couple of hours and really just barely scratched the surface. I suppose I’ll have to go back sometime. One thing that makes that easy: Admission is free. I love free museums. Not only because I am totally cheap, but also because I feel like I can just go in, look at a couple of things, and leave again. There’s no need to stay for hours and get my money’s worth. Well, come to think of it, that’s less true in this case, because I had to get all the way to London – with a plane ticket from the U.S., then a train ticket from Guildford for the day. But anyway, V&A. Yay.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

“The dinosaurs!” That’s what my boyfriend, who is British, told me I had to see at the Natural History Museum in London. So the museum and I sort of got off on the wrong foot when I discovered that the dinosaurs were all involved in some special exhibit that required payment. And I was feeling cheap. I was also feeling like a person who did not want to wait in a long line with a lot of excited children.

This may be unreasonable of me, since standing in a long line with a lot of excited children seems like it might be central to the NHM Experience. Now, to be fair, I was at the Natural History Museum during the August school holidays. And I also must point out that this museum, like all the museums I wanted to see in London, has free admission to most of the exhibits. That is pretty great. But I’d already had the line experience once, with about a 20-minute wait to get into the museum in the first place, so I decided to stick to the free parts of the museum.

The Natural History Museum has an astounding, late-19th-century building. It looks like this on the outside:

and like this on the inside:

That is the one and only dinosaur that was free to view. It’s a Diplodocus. Actually a cast of a Diplodocus, donated by Andrew Carnegie, who owned the original. (Read about it here.) The original is at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

My favorite object in the museum was this. Take a look. What do you think it is?

Looks kind of tree-like? Kind of pretty? Colorful? And a little bit spiky? And…like a Victorian chamber of horrors?

Yes, the case contains hundreds of hummingbirds mounted on branches among bits of lichen and nests. The label says they don’t know exactly where it came from, but this was the sort of thing Victorians went in for. It’s a way of thinking about nature where you appreciate it as things of beauty to be brought indoors and admired, not something you leave in its place for other people to enjoy. That’s a modern way of thinking, I suppose, and it’s probably a modern thing to feel sorry for the hummingbirds. I don’t really feel sorry for the hummingbirds as individuals. They would have died a long time ago anyway. But it’s a shame that they died just to be pretty in someone’s house.

I also enjoyed this intersection of earth and human life, from the earth sciences hall:

That’s a chunk of flint on the left and a paleolithic flint hand-axe on the right. This seems so delightfully English to me. Flint forms in chalk – and you know southern England has chalk, right? The white cliffs of Dover? Right. That’s chalk. The Cretaceous period gets its name from that layer of chalk. (The Latin word is “creta.”) And I like that they pair the chunk of flint with a real-life axe made more than 100,000 years ago. I know it’s the stereotype, that Americans go to Europe and are amazed at how old everything is, but, look. Everything there is OLD. It is really different. And totally cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

From the British Museum in London, I bring you a lady spinning fleece into yarn:

The label says it was made in Athens around 490 BC. Some people who make their own yarn still spin this way, with a drop spindle. You hold the wool in one hand and spin the yarn around with the other, just like the nice lady is doing on the vase.

This was in a section on daily life – apparently Ancient Greek ladies made their families’ clothing from scratch.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.