Word: smithsonian
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This is the message of a new $10 million permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington. Titled "Information Age: People, Information & Technology," the show brings together 700 objects and artifacts, ranging from Morse's telegraph to an early Apple computer. Through re-created scenes and videos, the exhibition tries to capture the mood of each period during the information age, which has repeatedly confounded both the hopes and fears of society. "Our goal was to display technology as a human enterprise," says curator David Allison, "subject to all the foibles and failures...
Predictions of the social impact of mass communications and computers were equally myopic. Bernard Finn, of the Smithsonian's division of electricity, notes that the sending of the first transatlantic cable message in 1858 was widely hailed as an event that would introduce an era of world peace because it would enhance communication between different peoples. Shortly afterward, the U.S. Civil War broke out, and the opposing armies took over telegraph offices, establishing a coupling between information technology and warfare that continues to the present...
...future if only because of the human tendency to fit new events into familiar categories. In a celebrated 1950s experiment, psychologist Jerome Bruner showed that ordinary people would "see" a red ace of spades as a regular black one if it was salted into an otherwise normal deck. The Smithsonian exhibit demonstrates that inventors are fooled in the same...
...been all uphill ever since. In 1986 another MacCready creation, perhaps his most remarkable, swooped high over Death Valley while being photographed for the Smithsonian Institution's IMAX film On the Wing. It was an awesomely realistic, radio-controlled, computer-brained, wing-flapping replica of the largest creature ever to have flown, the pterodactyl, which vanished with its dinosaur cousins some 65 million years...
...Gossamer Condor now hangs in a permanent spot next to the Wright brothers' first airplane at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, where the Solar Challenger and the pterodactyl have been displayed. The Smithsonian has also acquired the Gossamer Albatross and the Sunraycer...