By TONI LANDIS
If you attended Wilton Elementary back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, you probably remember that pivotal day in sixth grade when Mr. Wright went over all the interesting accomplishments of the great James Smithson.
No? Me neither.
What I do remember is the right-of-passage bus trip most sixth-graders took to Washington DC as members of the safety patrol. One of the highlights? The Smithsonian Institute.
Thanks to James Smithson, we Americans are the benefactors of “the largest museum, education, and research complex in the world.” The Smithsonian is made up of 19 museums, 21 libraries, nine research facilities, and the National Zoo; although if you dig a little deeper on the website or delve into Wikipedia, you’ll discover even more.
Who was James Smithson? We’d know a lot more if it weren’t for an 1865 fire that consumed most of his personal papers, unpublished manuscripts, detailed descriptions of his chemistry experiments, extensive mineral collection, and many of the other items that make up the trappings of life. Yet, author Heather Ewing manages to piece together a portrait of an illegitimate English man born to a widow and a prominent, married Duke around 1765. Never acknowledged by his father, Smithson was consequently “driven by a need for vindication and validation …” nearly every day thereafter.
According to Ewing, “Smithson pursued his scientific investigations to such a degree that he soon developed an expertise in an arena hardly being taught yet at Oxford: mineralogy. As early as 1784, when Smithson was still just nineteen, his proficiency in mineralogy was declared to be ‘already much beyond what I have been able to attain to’ by the person preparing the university’s first course in the subject.” And, Smithson’s experiments “were some of the many incremental, essential building blocks that helped bring chemistry into the modern age.”
Throughout Ewing’s account of the contributions Smithson made to the beginnings of serious science of all kinds, we learn of Smithson’s extensive travel to discover and gather various minerals and conduct numerous experiments. In the midst of his travels, he gets spooked and then delayed by stormy seas, caught up in war, and jailed for a time. He also struggles with a variety of illnesses and a gambling problem.
By the early 1800s, Smithson, though only in his 60s, begins thinking of his demise and writes a will. Making provisions for a nephew and his descendants, he is also inspired by institutes and educational endeavors being set up by other prominent people, as well as by the developments taking place in the “New World.” Having never set foot in America, his desire “to bequeath the whole of my property … to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” is incredible. When his nephew dies at 27 with no wife and no heirs (legitimate or otherwise — Smithson saw to that), the entirety of Smithson’s fortune ends up in Washington.
Ewing’s work explores the life of a man who made vast and varied contributions to the lives of millions upon millions of people. The estimated number of visitors to Smithsonian properties in 2018 alone was 28.5 million, according to the Smithsonianwebsite.
I learned about this book listening to an NPR story titled, “The Smithsonian’s FounderNever Set Foot in America. Now his Descendants are Touring the Museum.” Ewing is featured, and she reads from a list of his effects that ended up in Washington: “There was his mineral collection, his sword and his riding whip, all his laboratory equipment and all his clothes … And there were only two pairs of underwear.”
Funny, this detail isn’t anywhere in the book. I read pretty closely for it!
