Description: [caption id="attachment_10342" align="alignleft" width="228" caption="Miss Willey Glover DeNis, (1879-1929), Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2008-0987."][/caption] At the Archives, we often run across images that have minimal information associated with them. Sometimes it’s a number or a name (usually incomplete) or a year. It is rare to find a beautifully complete
Description: As the Director of Science Service, chemist Edwin Emery Slosson not only edited the submissions of his staff and external contributors but he also dispensed writing tips that remain timely today.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="Portrait of Dorothy Catherine Draper, copy of the original photo by John Draper, created by Daniel Draper, 1893, National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Division of Information Technology and Communications."][/caption] Imagine that you are the first person to take a photograph. What would you
Description: Why would an English chemist donate his fortune to the United States, a newly formed country he had never visited? We will likely never know exactly why in 1826 James Smithson chose to bequeath more than half a million dollars to create the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: For historians of science, the name “Sarton” resonates like a deep-throated bell. Isis, the international journal that chemist and mathematician George Sarton (1884-1956) founded in Belgium in 1913, is now the premier publication of the History of Science Society. The field he envisioned is flourishing as well as continually responding to changes in science and its social