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Collections
Many of the most
significant scientific advancements and leaders in twentieth century America
are represented in the Carnegie’s archival collections. The P Street
headquarters contains records of past Carnegie presidents Vannevar Bush,
Philip Abelson, and James Ebert as well as such scientists as George Ellery
Hale and Barbara McClintock. The financial records at P Street, including
a large series of leather bound general ledgers, reflect a detailed history
of investment in and planning of scientific experimentation and exploration.
Representative of
the breadth of the Broad Branch campus archives collection are records
of:
- DTM's
nuclear physics program in the 1930s and '40s (10+ linear feet of correspondence,
instrument designs, and research notes) and its early radio
astronomy program in the 1950s and '60s (25 linear feet)
- WWII research
on the proximity fuze and radio
propagation (40 linear feet)
- scientific drilling
in the geyser basin at Yellowstone National Park in the 1920s and '30s
(field notes, correspondence, photographs)
- 1500+
letters of Captain J.P. Ault chronicling scientific work at sea on board
the sailing ships Galilee and Carnegie (1905-1929)
- correspondence
and laboratory notebooks of renowned petrologist N.L.
Bowen (200+ letters spanning 1910-1954)
- architectural
plans of the historic laboratories in Washington and overseas magnetic
observatories
- specifications
and photographic records of early
20th Century scientific apparatus,
including magnetometers, dip circles, electroscopes, ionospheric records,
Van de Graaf generators, and presses for pioneering high-pressure experiments
on rocks and minerals (13,000+ photographs and figures, ca. 1909-1954)
- the “Maud”
Arctic Expedition under Roald Amundsen (1918-1925) and the second
Byrd Antarctic Expedition (1933-1935) (8 linear feet of geophysical
data)
Finding
aids are posted as collections are processed.
Online, searchable
databases of the collections are also available. |
