In the spring of 1922, two engineers met in Washington, D.C., in a spirit of hopeful conspiracy. Their goal was to establish a National Museum of Engineering and Industry under the aegis of the Smithsonian's United States National Museum, the nation's preeminent museum of natural history and anthropology. Holbrook Fitz-John Porter was a mechanical engineer, a Lehigh graduate who first became a national figure as chief of Machinery Hall at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As a consultant concerned with industrial safety and the human side of industry, Porter envisioned a shining monument in the nation's capital to the American engineer as a shaper of Western civilization.' His co-conspirator, Carl W. Mitman, a former mining engineer, was chief curator of the Smithsonian's technological collections. As initiator of the plans, Mitman projected a more reflective, scholarly institution devoted to the history and preservation of technology, especially artifacts associated with his own engineering profession. For years Mitman had dreamed of building a museum around the core of the burgeoning technological collections of the National