Yes, the late eighteenth century was a very exciting time for chemistry and Smithson was at the heart of this new field.
He lived a very peripatetic life. He knew virtually all the great minds of his generation and spent time in all the major scientific circles in Europe. He believed that advances would come only by working collaboratively. And he felt very strongly that there was a community of scientists who were above the idea of nations.
He became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society, at the age of twenty-two, and part of an inner circle of chemists playing a very active role in the organization. He traveled all over Europe, including France, Italy, and Germany, searching for minerals and conducting experiments. He wrote papers on all sorts of topics, from an analysis of a substance called tabasheer, sometimes found inside bamboo, to “an improved method of making coffee.” He also identified a zinc carbonate, smithsonite, which was named after him. He thought everything was worthy of study, from a lady’s tear to what makes a blackberry the color that it is.
The Royal Society also rescued him when he was taken prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars. The president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, helped imprisoned scientists from both sides by arguing that scientists were not at war—that the work of scientists benefited all nations—and he arranged for Smithson’s release.
So there is a picture here of a man who sees no national borders in the world of science?
Absolutely. His Smithsonian bequest, which has always seemed so enigmatic and bizarre, when viewed in that light actually starts to make some sense.
Smithson dedicated his whole life to science. He never married and had no children. And at the end of his life, he wrote a will in which, in the event that he had no heirs, his fortune would go to the United States of America “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution”—he specifies that much—“an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”
How much was the bequest worth?
Through investing, Smithson had increased his inheritance from his mother tenfold. His bequest was worth about half a million mid-nineteenth-century dollars—vastly more today. I think it’s more effective to imagine it as 1⁄66th of the entire federal budget in 1838.
What was the response to the Smithsonian bequest in America? Is it fair to say the debate mirrored some of today’s debates over the role of the federal government?
It was extremely contentious. It came at a time when the first seeds of the Civil War were brewing. President Jackson didn’t know whether he had the authority to accept such a gift, so he turned it over to Congress. The idea of a national institution in the nation’s capital was very problematic for some Southern senators who were fighting for states’ rights.
There was also a debate about what exactly this “institution for increase and diffusion” would be—a university, a library, a teacher-training college? John Quincy Adams wanted it to be an astrophysical observatory. Everyone had a different idea. In the end, it was something of a classic congressional compromise; they threw everything into the bill: laboratories, a library, an art gallery, meteorological research, and so on. And that’s how we got the Smithsonian we have today, which has a little bit of everything.
So the building of the Smithsonian became a major event?
Yes. Its governing body included the vice president of the United States and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Three congressmen and three senators sat on its board of regents, as well as seven citizen regents, from around the country. This is still true today.
I was surprised to see that Dan Brown made a big deal of the Masonic cornerstone-laying ceremonies for major D.C. buildings like the U.S. Capitol, but he didn’t mention that the Smithsonian building also had a Masonic cornerstone-laying ceremony. President Polk used the same gavel that George Washington had used when he laid the cornerstone for the Capitol and he used Washington’s Masonic apron as well. There was a huge parade from the White House down to the Mall. The Smithsonian also has a number of Masonic items in its collections.
Was Smithson a Mason?
The Masons do like to claim him. But I looked into that quite extensively and there’s no way to prove it.
But the Masons were involved in the cornerstone ceremony?
Freemasons came from all over the East Coast. The grand chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Maryland, who led the ceremony, said that he hoped the Smithsonian building would be a “central sun of science about which systems may revolve and from which light and knowledge may be reflected throughout every clime and kingdom of the globe.” That sort of idea has a lot of resonance with Smithson’s bequest.
In what way?
I like to think Smithson chose the States as his beneficiary not because he was giving something just to the U.S., but because he felt that we were the best trustees of this gift for the whole world; and that we, as this new, enlightened nation, based on laws and science, would be best able to execute his ideals.
The Castle is the original Smithsonian building. Is Dan Brown correct in his description of it as a “quintessential Norman castle”?
Yes, and no. It is inspired by Norman Romanesque architecture. But it is very much a nineteenth-century building. There’s a sort of pastiche quality to a lot of nineteenth-century architecture, and whimsy, too, and it’s all there.
It is a very important building in American architecture. If you imagine Washington in the 1830s, it’s a city of great big neoclassical white buildings, either marble or Aquia sandstone. They’re Greek- and Roman-inspired monuments. You have the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Treasury Building, and the U.S. Patent Office. The Smithsonian building was really one of the first public buildings in a medieval style in the United States.
So what was inside?
It originally housed a library, a natural history museum, a little art gallery, scientific laboratories, offices, meteorological research, and a publications exchange. There was a lot of mailing out of publications in the early days; that was the early interpretation of what “the diffusion of knowledge” would be.
The building also housed the head of the Smithsonian, who lived there with his family. Many of the young naturalists lived in the towers while they were cataloging the collections coming in from government expeditions exploring what would become the western United States.
And it was all funded by this one bequest?
Actually, the Smithson money was almost lost early on. Congress deposited the bequest in some state bonds, Arkansas and others, which some of them subsequently defaulted on. The government had to make up the money. John Quincy Adams rails in his diary about getting the Smithson funds out of “the fangs” of Arkansas.
The Smithsonian’s first secretary, Joseph Henry, became concerned that Smithson’s bequest for scientific research was going to be swallowed up by the responsibilities of taking care of the government collections. So, he arranged for an annual appropriation from Congress. Today, the Smithsonian receives about 70 percent of its budget from Congress.
Is it true that Smithson’s papers were destroyed in a fire?
Yes, Smithson’s papers were all lost in a fire at the Castle in 1865. It was a very cold day in January. Some workmen had brought in a stove while they were moving paintings around on the second floor. The building caught fire, taking the whole second floor. Smithson’s books, which were on the ground floor, were the only part of his legacy that survived. All his belongings—his mineral collection and his papers—were gone.
Moving to the modern Smithsonian, is Dan Brown correct in saying that the Smithsonian Museum Support Center (SMSC) is “the world’s largest and most technologically advanced museum” and that it holds more objects than the Hermitage, the Vatican, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art put together?
That is true. There are some fifty-four million items at the SMSC,
while the Hermitage contains more than three million and the Metropolitan Museum of Art more than two million. But when you’re dealing with huge study collections of fossils, insects, pressed plants, etc., you can imagine how quickly your collections would grow.
What about Brown’s characterization of the SMSC building?
It’s very well done, though the place is not quite as secretive as Brown makes out. It’s very bright and modern and high-tech. There were four pods in the original construction. They are all larger than football fields and several stories high. The zigzag structure was chosen to allow for additional growth.
The Wet Pod used to be in Pod 3—but not anymore. The Natural History Museum stored a lot of its collections in ethanol, formalin, and other alcoholic spirits, which are highly toxic and flammable, in its basement on the National Mall. But you don’t want these things where they pose a danger to your museum and visitors. So Pod 5 was opened in 2007 to put all the wet collections together.
Brown seems to have situated the book in that moment in time when Pod 5 is under construction and some of the wet collections are in Pod 3.
And is that where you can now find architeuthis and coelacanth?
Actually, anybody can see them now. The Smithsonian opened a new Ocean Hall in 2008 that has a coelacanth and two giant squid (architeuthis), a male and a female. The female was flown in from Spain. Because she was submerged in formalin and you’re only allowed to transport a certain amount of alcohol into the country, the U.S. military was involved in bringing her to Washington. They called it Operation Calamari.
How did Smithson himself end up in the museum’s collections?
Smithson died in Italy, in 1829. Around 1900, the city of Genoa was quarrying the cliff where the cemetery was located. They contacted the Smithsonian to say that they were going to move all of the remains. The board of regents said that it was fine to move Smithson to another burial place in Genoa. But Alexander Graham Bell, who was on the board—and also, coincidentally, a Mason—felt that Smithson should be honored in the United States for his exceptional bequest. Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, the head of the National Geographic Society, launched a media campaign to bring Smithson to the U.S. Bell and his wife went off to Italy, and Mrs. Bell photographed the whole thing, so there are these wonderful photographs of the exhumation.
They brought Smithson back to a huge reception. There was a big procession from the Navy Yard to the Smithsonian, with the president and Supreme Court justices and other dignitaries leading the way. Smithson lay in state in the Castle building. Then they put him in a crypt in the Castle, which is where he is today.
He finally made it to America.
Danger in the Wet Pod
Fact and Fiction About the Smithsonian
by the Editors
Chances are good that you’ve been to one of the museums that comprise the Smithsonian Institution. It is, after all, the world’s largest museum and research complex, and more than twenty-five million people will visit in any given year. In addition to the well-known Air and Space, Natural History, and National Portrait museums in D.C., and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, there are 156 Smithsonian affiliates around the country. Still, even if you are a regular patron, there’s an excellent possibility that the first time you heard of the Smithsonian Museum Support Center (SMSC) was in the pages of The Lost Symbol.
The SMSC is the setting for some of the most chilling scenes in the novel, including the one where Trish Dunne meets her unfortunate fate as roommate-for-eternity (or at least until they fish out her ethanol-soaked corpse) with a giant squid, and Katherine Solomon’s nail-biter of a confrontation in the absolute darkness with Mal’akh, someone she’d probably bounced on her knee at some point much earlier in their lives, not knowing then of his predilection for ink and grudges.
Dan Brown presents the SMSC as a gargantuan warehouse storing the wide array of treasures not on museum display—calling it a “secret museum” and “the world’s largest and most technologically advanced museum.” He describes Pod 5, the home of Katherine’s lab, as a massive football field–size space not yet wired for electricity. This requires Katherine to make a blind daily trek to her work space with nothing but a thin strip of carpeting to guide her. Katherine has nicknamed her lab “the Cube.” It runs on the power of hydrogen fuel cells, and is fully sealed off from the world by a lead-lined door. Within the Cube she delves deep into the secrets of noetic science, backing up her apparently vast experimental data on two redundant holographic memory storage units.
While the SMSC of The Lost Symbol is a strange and mysterious place, the real SMSC is nearly as fascinating—even if the reality is different from the fantasy version described by Dan Brown. Though most of the public isn’t even aware of its existence, it is far from a secret museum. One doesn’t simply walk through the front doors as one might the National Air and Space Museum or the National Portrait Gallery, but there are tours every Wednesday and appointments available to those who contact one of the Smithsonian museums with a request to see a particular collection not currently on display. The Smithsonian is quick to acknowledge that the treasures stored in the SMSC are the property of the taxpayers of the U.S. and that they therefore have a right to view this property. The only thing secretive about the Museum Support Center is that, in an attempt to save the items in their collection for generations to come, they don’t make these things as easily visible to the public as those on the National Mall.
The SMSC is located on a four-and-a-half-acre lot in Suitland, Maryland, about seven miles from the heart of Washington, D.C. The long, low building has a distinctive zigzag design and it opened in 1983 to serve as a storage and research facility for the overwhelming majority of items owned by the Smithsonian (only 2 percent of the collection is actually on display in the museums at any one time). There’s a little bit of everything here: giant Venezuelan rats, for example, along with Edward Curtis frontier photographs, meteorites, and the skulls of the elephants Theodore Roosevelt brought back from safari (as it turns out, the elephants you can see in the Museum of Natural History don’t have these heads any longer). There’s even the brain of Western explorer John Wesley Powell, which arrived at the Smithsonian via a bet. All told, there are somewhere around 54 million artifacts, and the Smithsonian can actually tell you what everything is and where everything is located thanks to a proprietary coding and cataloguing system. Rather humbling for those of us who often forget where we put our car keys.
The zigzag nature of the structure lets the storage pods remain separate from the offices and labs on the SMSC site and allows for expansion without breaking from the original design. Between the pods (which are fully sealed for the sake of preservation and security) and the offices is a huge corridor that SMSC staffers refer to as “The Street.” One can only access the pods through this corridor, which has just two entry points, one for visitors and one for items in the collection. Security is very high, with a combination of checkpoints, security officers, and electronic monitoring devices in use.
The temperature of the facility is set for 70 degrees (with a variance of 4 degrees in either direction) and relative humidity is 45 percent (with a variance of 8 percent up or down). Of course, for the sake of maintenance, some sections of the SMSC are considerably colder: there are samples here stored at 200 degrees below zero. Enormous industrial filters work overtime to keep the air within the entire complex scrubbed clean. The upside for employees is that allergens are virtually nonexistent. The downside is that you can’t open your window on a spring day or even have a sandwich at your desk because doing so will contaminate the near-perfect atmosphere.
As with Katherine Solomon, there’s a great deal of scientific research going on at the SMSC. Because the collection is so comprehensive and so well archived, scientists and scholars travel from al
l over the world to examine the holdings. It isn’t unusual for foreigners to come to the SMSC to discover critical details about their own native flora and fauna because the Smithsonian collection is more extensive than any they have in their homelands.
It is curious that Brown decided to describe Pod 5 as a dark, empty space, since the pod has been up and running—utilizing the latest in museum storage technology, including electricity—since 2007. There are accounts of his visiting the SMSC in 2008, so he must have known all about this. However, he might have deemed it too late to change an essential part of his novel. One can appreciate his decision to stray from the facts for the sake of his story. Depicting Pod 5 as it is today would have stripped much of the drama and mystery from the scenes set there. However, one does have to wonder why Katherine and friends continuously made that long walk to the entrance of the Cube without portable illumination. A flashlight would have done the job very well. A Zippo would have been an improvement over following the floor runner. For that matter, if you’re going to the effort of outfitting the Cube with a hydrogen fuel cell, couldn’t you run an extension cord or something to allow for a lamp? That chase scene with Katherine and Mal’akh truly was terrific, but it requires massive suspension of disbelief to get there.
While the Cube itself doesn’t exist (at least no one will admit that it exists), much of its technology does. Hydrogen fuel cells are around and they pack considerably more juice and maintain their power for much longer than traditional batteries. They would easily service the energy needs of the Cube were Pod 5 actually devoid of electricity.
Holographic memory is already in limited use, though it is currently far too costly for most applications and is generally seen as unnecessary, even for massive data needs. Of course, given Peter Solomon’s fortune, money would not be an impediment. Even the safeguards against contamination are plausible, though only noetic scientists seem to believe at this point that anything can filter out the “thought emissions” that others working around the real Pod 5 would generate.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 26