This Day in Smithsonian History

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Institutional History Division

This Day in Smithsonian History

January || February || March || April || May || June || July || August
September || October || November || December

Date	Event
October 1, 1987	A $2.7 million renovation and restoration project on the Great Hall of the Smithsonian Institution Building is inaugurated. During that time the Castle was closed intermittently to visitors. The "Federal City" exhibit goes into storage for a year during the renovation. As part of the renovation, gently graded and landscaped ramps to doorways east and west of the Castle's current main entrance will be built, making the building more accessible to visitors with young children or impaired mobility.
October 1, 1987	"A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution" opens at the National Museum of American History. The exhibition is designed to focus attention on the Bicentennial of the Constitution and explores a period when racial prejudice and fear upset the balance between the rights of citizens and the power of the state and led to the internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans for much of World War II. The exhibition also includes a section on the men in the 100th Battalion/ 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Japanese American unit of the United States Army.
October 2, 1975	Emperor Hirohito of Japan visits the National Museum of Natural History while he and Empress Nagako are in Washington on a tour of the United States. The Emperor, who is a marine biologist, conductes laboratory studies of a variety of marine specimens while at the Museum.
October 3, 1985	"A New Romanticism: Sixteen Artists from Italy" opens at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with 46 works by some of Italy's more provocative contemporary artists. A number of the artists were present for the opening.
October 4, 1974	The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opens to the public. It is the Smithsonian's museum for modern and contemporary art and is also known particularly for its extensive sculpture collection. The inaugural exhibition, representing highlights from the permanent collection, and including 900 works in all media, some of which had never before been exhibited, will run through September 15, 1975.
October 5, 1968	Opening ceremonies are held at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum collects and displays of paintings, sculptures, graphics, and photographs of men and women who have made significant contributions to the history, development, and culture of the United States. It is located in the former Patent Office Building, newly named the Fine Arts and Portraits Galleries, which it shares with the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the National Museum of American Art. On October 6, 1968, an opening is held for the Smithsonian Associates and on October 7, 1968, the Gallery is opened to the public.
October 6, 1981	"Yorktown: Echoes of a Victory," produced by the Office of Telecommunications, is broadcast nationwide as part of the Bicentennial celebration of the historic battle.
October 7, 1920	The steel hangarlike aircraft building (at Independence and Tenth Street S.W.) is opened to the public to exhibit aircraft and accessories produced during World War I. This metal structure, erected by the War Department on the Smithsonian Reservation in 1917 for the use of the United States Signal Service, was transferred to the custody of the Smithsonian Institution after the close of the war.
October 7, 1976	The Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design and Decorative Arts reopens to the public in New York City with the inaugural exhibition "MAN transFORMS, Aspects of Design." The museum houses one of the world's leading collections of decorative arts items, including textiles, glass, ceramics, furniture, and wallpaper. The director, Lisa Taylor, is the first woman to direct a Smithsonian museum.
October 7, 1979	Pope John Paul II visits the Smithsonian Institution Building. He is greeted by Secretary S. Dillon Ripley and Chief Justice Warren Burger and is presented with the Smithson medal.
October 7, 1990	The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in collaboration with staff from Harvard and Princeton universities, establishes the Center for Tropical Science to coordinate long-term research on the ecology and management of tropical forests at sites around the world.
October 8, 1993	"Monitoring Amazonia from Space" opens at the National Air and Space Museum. The temporary exhibit shows how modern satellite technology is monitoring the development and degradation of the Amazon region, one of the world's most complex and diverse ecosystems.
October 8, 1993	The United States Marshals Service donates a very rare 1946 Tucker automobile to the National Museum of American History transportation collection. Number 39 of only 51 such cars produced by the Tucker Corporation before it became embroiled in fraud allegations. The car was designed by Preston Tucker, Alex Tremulis, and a team of stylists and engineers. The car was seized in 1992 by the United States Marshals Service following a narcotics investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
October 9, 1967	An agreement is signed by Secretary S. Dillon Ripley and Daniel Maggin, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cooper Union Museum, giving the collection and library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration to the Smithsonian Institution.
October 9, 1979	"Edison: Lighting a Revolution" opens at the National Museum of History and Technology, now the National Museum of American History, in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the light bulb.
October 10, 1968	The largest show ever assembled of the work of artist Charles Sheeler goes on display at the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the National Museum of American Art, on October 10 for six weeks. The retrospective includes 135 paintings and drawings and 35 photographs.
October 11, 1975	"South America: Continent and Culture," a new permanent exhibit hall, opens at the National Museum of National History, the second of the reconstructed exhibit halls. It presents an ecological view of the diverse cultures of South America.
October 12, 1985	"Shark!" a permanent exhibition opens in the fossil hall of the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition features the jaws of Carcharodon megalodon, the colossal ancestor of the modern great white shark.
October 13, 1980	President Jimmy Carter signs legislation changing the name of the National Museum of History and Technology to the National Museum of American History, and the National Collection of Fine Arts to the National Museum of American Art.
October 14, 1976	"Hans Hofmann," the first large survey of the American artist's work since his death in 1966, opens at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It includes 75 oils painted by Hofmann between 1935 and 1965.
October 14, 1983	"Pain and Its Relief," an examination of mankind's attempts to understand, combat, and alleviate pain, opens at the National Museum of American History.
October 15, 1906	The cornerstone for the new United States National Museum, now the National Museum of Natural History building, is laid by Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott.
October 15, 1980	"The Coral Reef: Researching a Living System" exhibition opens at the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition marks the first time it has been possible to keep a large reef community, including corals, alive and functioning in isolation from the sea. More than three tons of coral rubble and a least two hundred species of plants and animals were transported from the Caribbean for the exhibition. Housed in a three-thousand-gallon tank system, this microcosm reef community is kept alive by high intensity lights, a wave-generating machine and a battery of monitoring equipment. Along with the exhibition is a laboratory area where research is conducted on the reef system. This is the first time an actual research project has ever been located in the museum exhibition area.
October 16, 1971	The Fort Pierce Bureau, a marine research facility in Florida, is established. It is created as a separate bureau under the Assistant Secretary for Science. In 1982 the facility became known as the Smithsonian Institution Marine Station at Link Port, and is administered by the National Museum of Natural History.
October 16, 1979	The exhibition "Smithsonian," comprising hundreds of objects borrowed from all branches of the Smithsonian, opens at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in New York.
October 17, 1974	"Plant Portraits" opens at the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition displays fifty botanical watercolors of pharmaceutical plants, combining great accuracy with sensitive insight, painted by the late Ida Hrubesky Pemberton.
October 18, 1977	A 75-carat emerald, believed to have been owned by Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, is given to the Smithsonian's National Gem Collection by Mrs. Stewart Hooker of New York.
October 19, 1923	On October 19, 1923, local Washington radio station WRC, of the Radio Corporation of America, begins broadcasting a series of talks on the Smithsonian Institution and its branches. Because of the success of these talks it is decided that a series should be given on scientific subjects. A regular time slot is given to the Smithsonian and the scientific series begins on April 9, 1924 with Austin H. Clark who gives a talk on "The Giants of the Animal World." Clark also ran the program. The series runs for more than four years.
October 20, 1983	"Robert Cornelius: Portraits from the Dawn of Photography" opens at the National Portrait Gallery, devoted to the work of the pioneering daguerreotypist, Robert Cornelius.
October 21, 1993	"Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection," opens at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and will last through January 9, 1994. This launches an extensive tour of 50 works charting the Dutch-born American artist's development from 1939-1985. The exhibit will also be seen in Barcelona, Atlanta, Boston, and Houston.
October 22, 1923	The transfer of deer, wild goats, sheep and cattle to the new enclosures near the Connecticut Avenue entrance of the National Zoological Park is completed without any problems.
October 23, 1826	James Smithson makes his will while residing in Bentinck Street, Cavendish Square, London. The conditions for the bequest to the United States are: "In the case of the death of my said Nephew [Henry James Hungerford] without leaving a child or children, or the death of the child or children he may have had under the age of twenty-one years or intestate, I then bequeath the whole of my property, . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men."
October 23, 1968	A major Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) observatory at Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, opens. Located in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona, the site was chosen by SAO director Fred Lawrence Whipple, and development of the site began in 1966. The observatory is renamed the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in a formal ceremony in May 1982.
October 23, 1991	"Seeds of Change" opens at the National Museum of Natural History. It commemorates the 500 years of cultural and biological exchanges between Europe and the Americas, since Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas, starting in 1492.
October 24, 1968	The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is established by the United States Congress (P.L. 90-637), and is placed at the Smithsonian Institution under a Board of Trustees appointed by former President Lyndon Johnson and President Richard Nixon. In 1970, it will be installed in the newly created floors occupying the former upper main hall of the Smithsonian Institution Building.
October 24, 1980	The exhibitions "The Great Crash" opens at the National Portrait Gallery and "After the Crash" opens at the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the National Museum of American Art, both commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the stock market collapse and the onset of the Great Depression.
October 25, 1983	"The Naming of America" opens at the National Museum of American History. The exhibition displays the world map of Martin Waldseemuller, thought to be the first map on which the name "America" was used.
October 26, 1993	The National Air and Space Museum opens an exhibition featuring the world's first operational jet bomber, the German Arabo Ar 234B Blitz. The exhibition is the second in the museum's "Air Power in World War II" series.
October 27, 1976	The Arts and Industries Building receives an Historic Preservation Award from the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The ceremony was held in the National Gallery of Art Cafe. A plaque, which was affixed to the building exterior, and four certificates of achievement of excellence in historic preservation, are awarded.
October 28, 1992	The National Museum of American History opens "Personal Legacy: The Healing of a Nation," an exhibition commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
October 29, 1982	"Charles Willson Peale and his World," reflecting the multifaceted talents of Peale as artist, scientist, and inventor, opens at the National Portrait Gallery.
October 30, 1980	The United States Court of Appeals rules that two exhibition areas in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) that focus on the scientific theory of evolution do not violate the First Amendment requirement of separation of church and state. The decision, which affirmed the decision of a lower court in Washington, also reports that the Smithsonian did not support or endorse any one religion by presenting exhibits with material on the evolutionary process. The suit was brought against the Smithsonian by Dale Crowley, Jr., a fundamentalist minister and executive director of the National Foundation for Fairness in Education in 1978, alleging that the use of federal funds in NMNH exhibits, specifically the "Dynamics of Evolution" (1979) and "Ice Age Mammals and the Emergence of Man" (1974) was a violation of the separation of church and state.
October 30, 1994	The George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, located in the Alexander Hamilton Customs House in New York City opened with three inaugural exhibitions: "Creation's Journey: Masterworks of Native American Identity and Beliefs," "All Roads are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture," and "This Path We Travel: Celebrations of Contemporary Native American Creativity."
October 31, 1997	"Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" opens at the National Air and Space Museum. The exhibition contains nearly 200 authentic props, costumes, characters and artworks used to make the trilogy of movies. The exhibition examines the mythology underlying the "Star Wars" movies.