WASHINGTON -- On a hazy August morning, an endless stream of tourists pours from the subway, fanning across the Mall to the museums that make up the Smithsonian Institution.
Sporting sensible shoes, knapsacks, money belts and speaking a babble of languages, the tourists peer at a Diplodocus skeleton, Steinway's 100,000th grand piano, space suits of the first astronauts, the Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter where the first civil rights sit-in took place.
It is more than a day trip or vacation for the 28 million people who tour the Smithsonian's 16 museums and National Zoo each year. It is a pilgrimage to glean a better understanding of our world from the Smithsonian's mammoth trove of stuff.
With nearly 140 million objects, 6,000 employees, as many volunteers and international research operations, the Smithsonian's significance as a repository, scholarly resource and educational tool has no institutional parallel in the world. It is a staggeringly complex organism, as variable, fascinating and difficult to define as the nation itself. And all of it is free.
Today and tomorrow, at the Smithsonian 150th birthday gala, revelers will get a concentrated glimpse of the museum's breathtaking sweep. In doing so, they will heed the wishes of James Smithson, who left his entire estate to the United States to create an institution for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." The illegitimate son of an English duke, Smithson had never seen the United States, but he apparently had a keen intuitive sense of the energetic young country.
In 1836, seven years after Smithson's death, Congress voted to accept the amateur scientist's astonishing gift -- worth approximately $6.75 million in today's dollars. On Aug. 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed an act of Congress establishing the Smithsonian Institution. The first museum opened in a newly constructed red sandstone castle in 1855.
Smithson's bequest launched the country on a binge of acquisition and research unmatched by any university or museum. The Smithsonian's willy nilly growth over the next 150 years mirrored that of the country. In fact, most of the museums' collections are stored in drawers or boxes in back rooms, never seen by the public.
With a passion
But the Smithsonian is about more than sheer size or quantity, writes James Conaway in "The Smithsonian: 150 Years of Adventure, Discovery and Wonder."
