Description: Have a little fun with images from our collections that have been designated as open access. Anyone can now download, transform, share, and reuse millions of images as part of Smithsonian Open Access.
Description: Everyone loves a parade – especially one followed by a banquet. When scientists and politicians met in Washington, D.C., on November 23, 1936, to celebrate the centennial of the U.S. patent system, they listened first to a conventional program of speeches. Then, in the afternoon, Science Service director Watson Davis arranged something different: a “Research Parade” featuring
Description: Though photographs are accepted as subjective but ultimately faithful visual reproductions of reality, in many instances they don’t correspond to our experience. Pupils don’t regularly glint red, and people don’t transform into the streaked, evanescent smears we so often witness in photos. Yet we have no trouble accepting these inconsistencies, knowing that taking a picture of
Description: As editor E. E. Slosson began setting up the Science Service news office, his mail was flooded with inquiries from potential contributors. Writers and photographers described their accomplishments and submitted samples of their work. One such letter, from Albert Harlingue on April 13, 1921, must have piqued Slosson’s interest, for it coincided with the Washington visit of “a
Description: Periodically—given the fleeting nature of life and the ubiquity of photographic imagery—it’s seems like someone’s always trying to hatch another ambitious image-based cultural project to prove that, despite our differences, we’re pretty all much the same.
Description: While Lucile Mann’s contributions to zoological history have often been reduced to her work raising infant animals, her work with the National Zoo and resulting publications demonstrate that her legacy should be reexamined.