2010s

Starstruck! Astronomers and Popular Culture (2017-2018), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Thursday, December 6, 2018

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Telescopes and a last will and testament. Clocks, a sketch of a comet, and a life mask. Astronomical photographs, a fly spanker, log books of data, and a tea set. Observers of Sputnik. Sheet music, trade cards, and a Wonder Woman comic strip. As disparate as...

Scale: A Matter of Perspective (2017), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Thursday, March 9, 2017

Alice motif with mushrooms

We see scale throughout our daily lives and navigate through it without thinking too much about our changing rank. The world is teeming with things larger and smaller in scale than us in size or social hierarchy. We have instruments to explore and analyze these things. We...

In the Lab with Stevens and Skinner (2017-), at William James Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Skinner with pigeons

The basement of Memorial Hall was home to the Psychological Laboratories of two pioneers: S. S. Stevens and B. F. Skinner. At one end was the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, established in 1940 by Stevens at the request of the US Army Air Corps. His mission was to improve...

Radio Contact: Tuning In to Politics, Technology, & Culture (2016), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Thursday, March 10, 2016

Radio Contact banner

Remember the times when the whole family gathered round the living room radio to listen to Roosevelt's fireside chats or detective dramas like The Shadow? When boys and sometimes girls tinkered with ham radio in garages in order to talk to people across...

A Case for Curiosity: Old Objects, New Contexts, Unexpected Stories (2015-2016), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, gallery in the History of Science Department, Harvard University, Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The microscope of a literary legend.
An illustration of a cannibalistic fish in the middle of his supper.
And the nose cone of a missile given as a Valentine's Day gift.

On display, these objects and many more curiosities seem completely disparate, but their stories come together to illustrate the interwoven and multidimensional nature of history. Although they are part of Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, their foremost scientific functions only begin to define the narratives brought to the foreground in this...

Body of Knowledge: A History of Anatomy (in 3 parts) (2014), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Thursday, March 6, 2014

Anatomy Theatre in Gallery

This exhibition explored the act of anatomizing not as a process of mapping a finite arrangement of bodily structures, but as a complex social and cultural activity. Body...

The Mark I Computer at Harvard (2014), at Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Originally called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Mark I was designed in 1937 by a Harvard graduate student, Howard H. Aiken to solve advanced mathematical physics problems encountered in his research. Aiken’s ambitious proposal envisioned the use of modified, commercially-available technologies coordinated by a central control system. Supported by Harvard faculty in the division that is today the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Aiken discussed his idea...

Time & Time Again: How Science and Culture Shape the Past, Present, and Future (2013), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Gallery view

Time: We find it, keep it, measure it, obey it, rely on it, waste it, save it, chop it and try to stop it. We organize our lives around it, and yet, do we really know what time is?

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Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.: Turing Tests, Parlor Games, & Chatterbots (2012), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Can machines think? This exhibit explored the strange afterlife of the Turing Test as it has circulated in popular, scientific, and commercial cultures. It reexamined Turing’s own interactions with humans and machines, later dreams of thinking machines, as well as an effort to translate Turing’s parlor game into a real test of artificial intelligence.

Staff curator assisting faculty guest curator Sophia Roosth and two grad students.

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X-Rays of the Soul: Rorschach and the Projective Test (2012), at Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Rorschach lenticular

In 1911, Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach began experimenting with inkblots to probe previously inaccessible layers of the unconscious self. Rorschach’s success led to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), created at Harvard in 1935 by lay psychoanalyst and artist Christiana Morgan along...

Sara J. Schechner

David P. Wheatland Curator

2010s

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