My name is Danielle and I am currently a museum studies graduate student interested in becoming a museum registrar. I spent this summer at The Henry Ford, working in the department of Historical Resources to digitize the museum’s typewriter collection.

As an intern in the Registrar’s office, I had the opportunity to work with the museum’s extensive typewriter collection, which consists of over 100 typewriters. The typewriters range from a Sholes & Glidden, invented in the 1870s, to a Typatune musical typewriter (above). The collection also includes typewriter accessories, such as stands and cleaning kits, as well as trade catalogs produced by typewriter manufacturers and photographs of typewriters found in offices and workspaces. Continue Reading

21st century, 2010s, communication, research, digitization, conservation, collections care, by Danielle Bowman, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford

A planned two-week checkup inspection of the iconic house of the future - Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House - turned into a two-month long “surgery” to repair extensive fatigue cracking of the thin aluminum beams that form the deck of the house. The cracks were visible from the underside, which is only accessible by sliding on your back on the museum's teak floor in about 18 inches of workspace.

Thorough inspection indicated that the damage was happening only in areas where the public walks. There were no cracks in the living room, which has never been accessible to visitors.

The cracks were developing due to the flexing of metal at the sharp edge of L-shaped brackets supporting the beams. Remember, there was no precedent for the use of aluminum in this architectural application, so we guess that Bucky was never aware he had allowed this fundamental design flaw. The house was a prototype in process - so it's understandable.

Our first look at the problem set off a flurry of activity to plan for repair. Fortunately, we had most of the expertise and labor required right on staff. Tim Brewer was there every step of the way when we put the house together the first time in Oct 2001; he knows every bolt and cable of the complicated dwelling machine.

Our dedicated volunteer Richard Jeryan, a retired engineer from Ford Motor Company, knew the best local firm to jump in and manufacture repair patches for us. Metro Technologies, located in Troy, Mich., made and helped install the necessary patches using high-tech adhesive and large rivets.

Most of the conservation department had a role as well. Some of our part-time staff - notably Fran McCans and Jill Maki - put in many extra hours to see this fascinating project through in good time.

Just getting at the problem required the removal of hundreds of fasteners – the stainless steel bolts, wood screws and aluminum rivets that hold the whole house together. Removing all those rivets while working in such tight spaces was challenging.

We lifted and moved the closet “pods” to open up more of the floor.  We shored the structure with lumber and removed the offending brackets. We pounded-out the floor-boards to access the bolts that retained the brackets.

Then we drill-out the ends of the cracks to arrest their progress in preparation for the addition of thicker aluminum patches custom-fit to the tapered U-shaped profile of the beams.

Two Metro Tech guys came in to apply the patches. Then we closed the first half and repeated the whole process for the second half of the deck.

Meanwhile, we worked with staff carpenters to make a new “over-floor” of plywood to install under the carpet.  This serves to spread the load of visitors’ foot-falls, reducing that flexing stress that causes fatigue in metals.

After reassembly and the carpet is relaid, the change will go unnoticed by most visitors.

Those of us familiar with the house can feel a distinct difference: it feels much more solid. Bucky meant for the house to hang from the mast.  He described the deck as “pneumatic” in some publications…but he had no idea that his prototype would become one of Henry Ford Museum’s most loved exhibits one day, with hundreds of thousands of visitors walking through it every year.

We think our work has preserved this house for another couple generations at least.  Only time will tell.

Clara Deck is former Senior Conservator at The Henry Ford.

Additional Readings:

• Dymaxion House Reconstruction in Henry Ford Museum, December 26, 2000
  
• Curating & Preserving: The Dymaxion House
  
• Membership Spotlight: Blake Almstead
  
• Living in the Dymaxion House

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, engineering, design, Henry Ford Museum, collections care, conservation, by Clara Deck, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

When guests see the Rosa Parks bus on display inside Henry Ford Museum, they are often in awe. Speechless. Moved, even.

And you don't have to merely look at this magnificent milestone in American history. When you visit Henry Ford Museum, you can actually climb aboard, walk the narrow aisle of the bus - and even sit in the very seat that Rosa Parks occupied on December 1, 1955.

But during that visit, two questions are typically asked: "Is it THE bus?" and "How did The Henry Ford get it?"

The answer to the first question: Yes, it is.

How the bus was acquired is a more modern story. In September 2001, an article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the Rosa Parks bus would be available in an Internet auction in October. Once we had confirmed the answer to the question posed above, we entered the online auction and came out the highest bidder.

After nearly five months of restoration, with support from the Save America's Treasures grant program, the Rosa Parks bus made its return to the floor of Henry Ford Museum on February 1, 2002. (With Liberty And Justice For All, the exhibition where the bus currently is displayed, had not yet been constructed.)

Paint chips from the unrestored bus, consultation with other experts, vintage postcards and eyewitness accounts from a museum employee who lived in Montgomery during the bus boycott allowed the museum to recreate the paint colors exactly.

Restoration efforts were performed on the bus down to the tiniest detail. For example: On the day Mrs. Parks boarded it, the bus was already seven years old and ran daily on the streets of Montgomery. Therefore, for authenticity, conservation experts applied recreated Alabama red dirt in the wheel wells, and tire treads and period advertising was recreated for the interior and exterior of the bus.

With all of these elements together and pondering what happened on December 1, 1955, exploring this historic artifact creates a powerful connection for many.

21st century, 20th century, research, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, women's history, Rosa Parks bus, Rosa Parks, Henry Ford Museum, conservation, collections care, Civil Rights, African American history

If you’re a regular reader of The Henry Ford’s blog, you might have noticed several recent blog posts about The Henry Ford’s ongoing effort to digitize its collection – from a special project to photograph 120 of the collection’s vehicles to the rapid capture of 2D archival materials.

Capturing the 3D collection in electronic format has its own joys and pitfalls. The three-dimensional objects have a (sometimes substantial!) weight and heft to them, they are in various states of fragility, they are on exhibit or well-packed in storage, and in some cases, they may have particular complications in handling due to their age or the materials from which they are made.

Take, for example, our hubcap collection.

“Hubcaps?” you might ask. “Why hubcaps?”

Well, The Henry Ford has collected hundreds of hubcaps. Matt Anderson, our Curator of Transportation, explains their importance this way:

“The hubcap’s evolution mirrors that of the car itself. What began as a purely practical device grew into a stylish form of expression. Manufacturers mark hubcaps with logos and use different designs to complement a vehicle’s overall form, from elegant wire to sporty magnesium alloy. Some owners install custom caps, further personalizing their vehicles.”

In short, there is more to a hubcap than meets the eye, which is why they found their way into our digitization process recently.

The first step in digitization is locating and retrieving the object(s) we want to digitize, which are usually either in on- or off-site storage or on exhibit somewhere on the premises and can only be retrieved by staff members specially trained to handle the objects.

 

 

 

Once retrieved, objects need varying levels of conservation. This can involve something as simple as cleaning, or much more involved procedures to restore the stability of an object. Here, conservation specialist Marlene Gray examines and treats boxes and boxes of hubcaps.

 

 

Once they are all clean and shiny, the hubcaps are carefully moved over to our photography studio, where they get the glamour treatment. In the photo below, Conservation Specialist Sarah Kollar and our photographer Rudy Ruzicska pick out the next hubcap to be photographed, using the camera set-up behind and just to the right of Rudy in the below photograph.

 

 

Some complex objects get many photographs from multiple angles, while some, like the humble hubcap, get one good chance to shine (literally).

Once the photograph(s) have been taken, the digital images have to be named, appropriately sized, and moved into our collections database, which looks a lot like Sarah sitting at a computer with spreadsheets nearby.

 

 

From there, we create a description of the object within our collections database. Collections documentation specialists within our registrar's office enter the material the hubcap is made of, noting its color, dimensions, any inscriptions it might have and any other information about it or its origin that they can glean, which often entails some research and consultation with curators.

Meanwhile, other collections documentation specialists and curators write brief narratives for many of the objects, explaining how and when they were used and their historical significance. When all this information is entered into our collections database, it looks like this:

Once the object is described within our collections system, and once it has at least one good photograph, it is ready for prime time!

Right now, each digitized object goes to two different digital homes: our collections website and our digitized collection on the interactive touchscreen kiosks within the Driving America exhibit.

You can save favorite items into sets and share them back and forth across both venues, adding new favorites as you go!

What hubcaps (or other collections items) will make it into your sets?

Ellice Engdahl, Digital Collections Initiative Manager at The Henry Ford, finds hundreds of hubcaps surprisingly compelling.

collections care, conservation, photography, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization

“You must be this small to enter.” How many times do you hear that in the workplace?

This week, our historic operating machinery specialist, Tim Brewer, and I have been squeezing between tie-down cables and sliding around underneath R. Buckminster Fuller's "house of the future," the Dymaxion House. We were part of the original team that restored this unique prototype and built it inside Henry Ford Museum.

Now, for the first time since it opened in October 2001, we have closed the house to the public; this shutdown will be for as brief a time as possible - we promise! - but it is essential to ensure the long-term preservation of the structure. (In the meantime, you can still view the exhibit and the exterior of the house from the platform.)

So what exactly is happening to the Dymaxion House during this time?

This extraordinary structure really does hang from the mast, with a cabled hoop (“cage”) system that the exterior wall “skin” floats on. We are using laser-levels to assess the relative movement of components in the cage system.

In addition, the flooring system (or deck) is made of hollow aluminum “beams,” with plywood attached with clip strips of bent aluminum. Right now we are determining the extent of wear on the deck  after 10 years of relatively trouble-free service.

As expected, we are finding more deterioration in the flooring path where visitors walk through the artifact, and we’ll be working hard over the next little while to repair any damages so our favorite house can delight the public for years to come. More details to come in a future post!

Senior Conservator Clara Deck has been a conservator at The Henry Ford for 20 years. Preserving the material integrity of the objects is her job - but making them look great is icing on the cake.

Additional Readings:

• Dymaxion House
  
• Gauging the Condition of the Dymaxion House
  
• Dymaxion House
  
• Drawing, "The Dymaxion House at Henry Ford Museum," 2002

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, Henry Ford Museum, conservation, collections care, by Clara Deck, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

What does lounging by the pool on a hot day have to do with automotive restoration?

In the case of one of our antique vehicles, more than you think!

Early tires for automotive vehicles were made of natural rubber and were made in one piece - somewhat like a heavily reinforced inner tube. These tires are often referred to as "tube tires," and some of the more common sizes are still produced by specialty suppliers.

But not all sizes are still made, or even available - and this was the case recently with our department’s restoration of the 1899 Duryea Trap for the new Driving America exhibition.

This vehicle came to our labs as an older restoration that dated from the 1930s. It arrived in fairly poor condition, with seized corroded metal components, flaking paint, moth-eaten upholstery and the clincher: heavily degraded tires.

The artifact could not be put on display without tires, as a guest would likely focus on their absence and therefore miss the aesthetic beauty of this early horseless carriage

So what to do?

Believe it or not, it became a constant source of unending debate as to how to proceed, what materials to use...until - eureka!!

Summer was in full swing and with it came lounging by the pool. Our head of preservation, Mary Fahey, came to me with the observation that a common foam pool noodle had the right diameter for the tires we needed. So we thought, why not? We could make that work...after all, the vehicle would never need to run, as it was far too precious an object to risk the damage that a restoration of that extent - and its subsequent running - would cause. It didn’t even really need to roll, as we usually do not let vehicles with original tires touch the ground anyway! It was doable.

So we gathered up a few dollar store pool noodles as the base for our new tires and put them through a fairly extensive process, which involved strengthening them through multiple coatings of various flexible putties and a central reinforcing. This process produced the results that you now see.

We only hope that now that you know the full story - and what’s behind what appears to be a natural rubber tube tire - that you won’t focus too much on them and still consider the overall beauty of this precious artifact.

Robert Coyle is a transportation conservation specialist for The Henry Ford.

by Robert Coyle, conservation, collections care, cars, Henry Ford Museum, Driving America