“Information Age” at the National Museum of American History

Abstract

Exhibit Reviews “INFORMATION AGE" AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY EDWARD TENNER “Information Age: People, Information, and Technology,” a new permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Mu­ seum of American History, may not be the first blockbuster show at a technology museum, but it sets a new standard for ambition and electronic complexity. The presentation hardware alone would stock a superstore. There are 10 miles of cable, two theaters, a minicomputer, forty-eight personal computers, and forty-three videodisc players. One curator of the exhibit told me it would take a visitor two and a half hoursjust to see all the audiovisual presentations. A concluding “videowall experience” called “The New Age” is a composite of twelve television screens, each linked to a computer-controlled, synchronized tape player. Within the lifetime of many visitors, the entire computer power of the United States was less than that of the electronics assembled here. “Information Age” is, among other things, technology about tech­ nology, just as there are films about film and television about television. Visitors are encouraged to pick up a brief guide imprinted with an individual bar code, scan it at five stations with interactive programs “to enter information into the exhibition’s computer net­ work,” and obtain a souvenir printout of their visit. Touch-screen presentations are spread throughout the floor. Interactive terminals offer experiences closer to science centers than to traditional histor­ ical displays. The range of American experience here is equally daunting: business organization, railroad operations, home entertainment, mil­ itary command and control, industrial automation, and scientific research are represented. If there is any great theme, in fact, it is the Dr. Tenner writes on technology and society. He has been executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press and has held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.® 1992 by Edward Tenner. All rights reserved. 780 “Information Age” at the National Museum ofAmerican History 781 close link between computing and communicating. While some parts of the exhibit are set pieces, such as the Kennedy-Nixon debates, others are unknown to all but a handful of enthusiasts and specialists. Still others are famous but rarely on public display, such as the ENIGMA machine. Given the space allotted and the limits ofhuman heads and feet, the Smithsonian has generally succeeded in introducing visitors to histor­ ical questions of information in society—as opposed, for example, to a more restricted definition it might have chosen. “Information Age” has three main chronological sections—1832— 1939, World War II, and 1946—today—which in turn have ten inter­ active centers marked by special symbols in the guide. The exhibition starts on a dramatic note. In a darkened passage, the visitor sees a painted street illuminated for a parade to celebrate completion of the first transatlantic telegraph in 1858, complete with the interior ofNew York’s Trinity Church whence a sermon resounds on the blessings of international communication. Around the corner is the anticlimax: the telegraph office closed before any commercial traffic could be accepted, the connection broken because of the limits of cable technology. This amusing but serious lesson in the hazards of technological pioneering is followed by a superb set of exhibits on the telegraph and telephone. Samuel Morse’s telegraph is presented as an ingenious synthesis of off-theshelf technologies and concepts: Joseph Henry’s electromagnet, cop­ per wire, print-shop equipment, batteries, and even an artist’s canvas stretcher. Two large walls of the first part of the exhibition continue the theme of instantaneous communication: the social and commercial logic behind printing and sounding telegraphs and their use in the military, in businesses, newspapers, firehouses, and hotels, and finally by private individuals. The telephone and radio receive the same meticulous documenta­ tion (to give just two examples) with the parallel development of Alexander Graham Bell’s and Elisha Gray’s instruments from the harmonic telegraph, and the part that graduate physics education played in the development of vacuum tubes. Here, too, is the best of both worlds: a striking number of important original instruments along with labels that put them in a business and social framework— for example, the role...