Word: smithsonian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Washington the Smithsonian Institution is shipping 57,200 insects to a secret cache. Why all the fuss over a tattered bug on a rusty pin? Or a frowsy bird skin? A pickled fish? Because these are the type specimens—the original catches from which the species was first scientifically described and defined. Like the platinum-iridium bar in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres on which the meter is engraved, each specimen is the standard against which other members of the species and new varieties are measured...
...species since the type specimen was first chosen, a century or two ago. And, though any curator can catch a Musca domestica (or housefly) in his own soup, he would probably give his right ear to have the original type. Among other items selected for bomb-sheltering from the Smithsonian collection (valued at $300,000,000 but irreplaceable, says one of its officers, at three times that figure...
Most of the big dinosaurs will have to risk staying in Washington; so will many another object. It would be too heroic a task to bottle, bundle, crate and ship even a large fraction of the Smithsonian's 1,000,000 fish, its 1,750,000 plants, its 510,000 historical relics. (Only 5% of this material is displayed for the museum's 2,500,000 yearly visitors.) A Smithsonian zoologist last week estimated that the alcohol required to preserve the chosen animals for the duration would be enough to provide the entire Japanese army with...
...Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology and various other authorities back up TIME'S translation of the Ojibway word ogontz (variants: ogans, ogah) as "pickerel'"' or "walleyed pike." Despite its name, this is a very respectable fish...
...solar-energy heater patented last week by Dr. Charles G. Abbot, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a tire less inventor of solar-energy machines. His newest eliminates many of the circulation pipes which made older models clumsy, costly, tricky. A concave cylindrical mirror, clockworked to follow the sun, focuses the solar rays on a vacuum-insulated tube filled with a heat-absorbing liquid such as black petroleum. As the petroleum heats, it rises to a reservoir, from which cool petroleum then descends into the heating element by gravity. As the reservoir gets hotter, it can be used for cooking...