Modernizing the Attic

"A poor, mildewed old fossil," Mark Twain called the Smithsonian Institution. He was wrong: in 1869, when the great author let fly at it, the Smithsonian, founded 23 years before, only seemed old. But the museum doggedly proceeded to fossilize itself with quaint, dutiful and embarrassing exhibits. Into its red brick neo-Romanesque castle on the edge of the Mall in Washington, D.C., went the Lord's Prayer, engraved in the space of a needle's eye, a necklace made of human fingers, and a pair of Thomas Jefferson's leather britches. Civil War General Phil Sheridan's horse, Winchester, was stuffed and put on show along with an array of First Lady manikins decked out in their own clothes, and the U.S. flag of 15 stars and 15 stripes that Francis Scott Key saw by the dawn's early light over Fort McHenry, Md.

As the official U.S. national museum, faithfully attended by 14.5 million visitors a year, the Smithsonian still avidly collects national memorabilia--General Eisenhower's dress uniform, the Friendship 7 space capsule--but at the venerable age of 118, much of its mildew has been cleaned off. The old fossil is in the midst of a flourishing rejuvenation. In the first step of an ambitious new building program, the Smithsonian's vast Museum of History and Technology last month moved from cramped, cluttered quarters into a $36 million pink Tennessee marble palace that squats with blank-walled solidity on Constitution Avenue. At the same time, the Institution got a plain-talking new boss, S. Dillon Ripley II, 50, who has set out to erase the impression, "held by educators and laymen alike, that anyone associated with a museum is some sort of stuffed specimen."

Ornithology & OSS. Ripley is certainly no triumph of taxidermy. Science-minded since youth, he made his first field trip at 13 when he hiked around Western Tibet with an older sister. Soon after graduating from Yale ('36) he decided "to abandon all thoughts of a prosperous and worthy future and devote myself to birds." Ripley's career as a migrant ornithologist took him to Southeast Asia, Nepal and India. During World War II, as the OSS intelligence chief in Ceylon, he happily combined bird watching with training secret agents.

Once, while shaving in preparation for a garden party in Kandy, Ripley looked out the window and spotted a Picus chlorolophus wellsi (small green woodpecker) that he needed for his collection. He grabbed his gun, dashed out of his hut wrapped only in a bath towel, and started shooting. The gun's recoil jarred the bath towel off. As the guests, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, gawked at his lanky (6 ft. 3 1/2 in.), naked figure, Ripley enthusiastically retrieved the fallen Picus. After dressing, he urbanely rejoined the party.

Mysterious Gift. For the last four years Ripley has been director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. In his new post he hopes to harness the untapped educational resources of the Smithsonian for the joint benefit of the institution and the nation's colleges. Utilizing the "guts behind the facade" of museum displays, he would like to have the Smithsonian's faculty of 328 scientists (half Ph.D.s) train graduate and post-doctoral students. Another goal is a closer partnership between the museum and universities, which would enable curators and professors to switch places for a spell.

The idea of exploiting the educational potential of the Institution echoes the broad aims of Founder James Smithson, an illegitimate son of the 1st Duke of Northumberland (and on the side of his mother, a descendant of King Henry VII). While a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, Smithson became fascinated with mineralogy and the science of modern chemistry, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 22.

Smithson never visited the U.S.; indeed, his only known link with the country was through a halfbrother, the Earl Percy, who had commanded the redcoats at Concord in 1775. Congress was amazed to learn six years after he died in Genoa in 1829 that the unknown Englishman had willed his fortune of $550,000 to the U.S. to establish an institution bearing his name. Though Senator John C. Calhoun cried, "It is beneath our dignity to receive presents from anyone," Congress finally accepted the gift. In 1904, Alexander Graham Bell brought Smithson's bones from Italy, had them buried in a tomb below a tower of the Smithsonian's old castle on the Mall.

Armies of Insects. The museum soon earned a reputation as "the nation's attic." The assortment ranges indiscriminately from the vacuum pan in which Gail Borden invented condensed milk to the 441-carat Hope diamond, from vintage U.S. automobiles and airplanes to the latest rockets, and from a display of early American underwear to a restoration of a turn -of -the -century Georgetown confectionery.

Through private donations and through its own 2,000 expeditions, the Smithsonian has amassed 57 million catalogued items, including 300,000 mammals, 3,000,000 dried plants, 9,500,000 stamps, 10 million mollusks and 14 million insects. Yet such wholesale accumulations have their uses. A

Smithsonian scientist's single-minded devotion to microscopic shelled creatures called foraminifera led to the discovery that oil is likely to be found where certain species of the animals lie buried in rock layers. During World War II, when the Japanese floated incendiary balloons to the U.S., museum experts advised the Air Force on the location of the enemy launching sites by analyzing the sand used as ballast.

Plus Art Galleries. Overcoming a prolonged tendency to record the culture of the American Indian at the expense of other research projects, the Smithsonian has kept up with the times in specialized fields. It established the U.S. Weather Bureau, helped finance the early rocket experiments of the pioneering Robert H. Goddard. Currently, the Smithsonian carries out tropical-disease studies in a 10.5 square-mile jungle island surrounded by Gatun Lake, in the middle of the Panama Canal.

At its Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and from twelve satellite tracking stations throughout the world, the Smithsonian pinpoints the path of manmade space objects. Through the years Congress has also made the Smithsonian a cultural grab bag for a wide variety of enterprises, including the famed National Gallery of Art (operated autonomously by its own trustees), the Freer Gallery of American and Oriental Art, the National Collection of Fine Arts, and a newly authorized National Portrait Gallery. It also runs the zoo in Rock Creek Park, and will incorporate the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, when it is built, as an independently run bureau of the Institution.

Despite his wealth and prestige as a scientist, James Smithson was a bitter, lonely man whose illegitimacy was a lifelong stigma. If the motive for his bequest was a desire to perpetuate his name with honor, Smithson succeeded with honors to spare. He himself predicted: "My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.

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