Museum Monday

Microscopes on display at SFO Museum

Airports, Exhibits, Museum Monday, Museums, , ,

Flying lifts you above it all, offering a chance to take in the big picture from the sky.

But travelers who touch down at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) now have an opportunity to get down to specifics with a new exhibition exploring the history of microscopes.

Simple microscope with case 1673–1748; Courtesy SFO Museum

“From mid-seventeenth-century simple microscopes to the modern compound optical devices by German makers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these are the instruments that revealed the long-held secrets of the natural world—the existence of microorganisms, the structure of biological cells, and the composition and operation of a variety of previously unseen life forms. Nearly 350 years after Robert Hooke introduced a ‘newly visible world,’ we continue to rely on the microscope in our eternal quest to better understand the world we inhabit and the challenges posed by that which remains invisible to the unaided eye.”

[From the exhibition release]

If you can’t make it to the airport, you can view a selection of microscopes and other objects from the exhibition online.

Detail of specimen slides with seeds c. 1820; courtesy SFO Museum

A World Examined: Microscopes from the Age of Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century is on display pre-security in the International Terminal Main Hall Departures Lobby, at San Francisco International Airport through June 24, 2012.

Museum Monday: Hidden Treasures you might wish you could see

Museum Monday, Museums, , , ,

We visit museums to see rare, wonderful and unusual objects on display. But most museums have room to exhibit just 10 percent of their holdings. The rest rarely — or never — sees the light of day. Unless, that is, you have a key to the back rooms where they keep hidden treasures like the ones I found for a slide show on Bing Travel.

Here are some of the highlights from that story.

In the United States, flea circuses were once regular features in carnivals and sideshows. This diorama in the collection of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in Indiana features four fleas (heads only) in a village scene and is mounted in a hazelnut that is encased in a matchbox. According to a museum staff member, the tiny diorama is kept in storage because “people would have to line up to see it and it would be difficult for a family to view together.”

This pretty but rarely displayed quilt in the collection of Washington’s Yakima Valley Museum was made in 1928 by the wife of a berry farmer and has a story far more complicated than meets the eye. According to the note that came with the donation, the white fabric in the background came from masks once worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Mass., displays 3,200 hand-crafted glass models of flowering plants created between 1886 and 1936 by German glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. Not on display are the university’s 430 Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates, such as this glass model of a Portuguese man of war, which Harvard acquired in the late 19th century.

For more hidden treasures, check back tomorrow.

Museum Monday:Game Over at National Pinball Museum

Art, Exhibits, Museum Monday, Museums, ,

If you’re in Washington, D.C. today, go visit the National Pinball Museum.

Today – Labor Day – is the last day to visit the museum before it closes and packs up for a move to Baltimore, Md.

The National Pinball Museum has more than 200 machines on exhibit spanning 140 years of pinball history “from Bagatelle (the 18th Century precursor to pinball) through to modern day computerized marvels.”

There are films about the history of pinball, exhibits exploring the art and artwork that made the games so appealing to the eye and so much fun to play and, best of all, a Pay-to-Play exhibit where you can drop a few quarters and play 40 machines ranging from classic, vintage wood rail games to modern solid state machines.

The museum is open today for free and is located at The Shops at Georgetown Park (3222 M St. NW) in Washington, D.C.

After closing today the plan is to reopen in Baltimore in a few months.

Here’s one of my favorite pinball games:

It was on display awhile back at San Francisco International Airport as part of an SFO Museum exhibit on the history of pinball that included many machines from the Pacific Pinball Museum – and the opportunity to play pinball at the airport for free.

Museum Monday: see the history of TV at SFO Airport

Advertising, Exhibits, Layover, Museum Monday, Museums, , , ,

Travelers heading to or through San Francisco International Airport now have a chance to tune in and turn on before they take off, thanks to the latest offering from the SFO Museum.

 

Television: TV in the Antenna Age is filled with television sets and related items from the first four decades of television

 

Models range from the earliest commercial sets with 7-inch screens in Art Deco wooden cabinets to colorful plastic versions from the 1970s designed to look like space helmets and flying saucers.

 

Here’s a preview:

Philco Predicta 4654 Pedestal - 1959

Hoffman M143U Easy Vision 1954

TVs from the early 1970s

Memorabilia from Howdy Doody, Romper Room and other TV shows

Television: TV in the Antenna Age is on view in Terminal 3, post-security in Boarding Area F through February 6, 2012.

(All photos courtesy of SFO Museum)

Museum Monday: “Propliners” at SFO

Air Travel, Airlines, Airplanes, Exhibits, Museum Monday, Museums, , ,

A new exhibition at the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport shows off scale models of propeller-driven transport aircraft used in the design, manufacturing and marketing process of the aviation industry in the late 1940s and 1950s.

According to the museum, these propliner models helped the airlines imagine the new airliner operating within their fleet and were used promote their services in airline offices and travel agencies.

This exhibition includes twenty-three models from the Collection of Anthony J. Lawler. “They represent the age of postwar propliners, which lasted until the 1960s when faster, more fuel-efficient and propeller-less turbojet airliners superseded them.”

Look for the propliners in the front cases of the Aviation Museum and Library in SFO’s International Terminal through December 2011.

You can also get a preview here.

Photos courtesy of SFO Museum