A truly "grass roots" sport, organized "go-karting" arose in the late 1950s. In the 1930s and late 1940s, various types of smaller open-wheeled race cars had been developed for certain classes of ...

This upright piano was made by John Isaac Hawkins in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1801. Hawkins patented an ingenious small upright piano with a folding keyboard, of which the Smithsonian’s is an ...

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been cheering the team on since the Cowboys football team’s inception in 1961 but it wasn’t until 1972 that the iconic uniforms were created. With the distinctive ...

Charles Elmer Doolin, founder of the Frito Company, was an inventor with a restless mind. In 1932 he bought the recipe for Fritos (“little fried things”) for $100 from Gustavo Olguin, the owner of a ...

In March of 1968, An Wang saw a prototype of Hewlett-Packard’s HP9100 programmable desktop calculator. This machine reduced the task of finding many scientific functions from programming to pushing a ...

Telegraph relays amplify an electrical signal in a telegraph line. Telegraph messages travel as a series of electrical pulses through a wire from a transmitter to a receiver. The pulses fade in ...

The Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History holds an extraordinary series of early color photographs: sixty-two color daguerreotype plates made by Rev. Levi L. Hill ...

Eau de Quinine compound hair tonic was introduced in the 1850s by Ed. Pinaud’s (Edouard Pinaud), a Paris parfumerie. Advertisements indicate that the product was sold into the 1960s. Quinine is a ...

You are in a hallway just outside the entrance to the exhibit. As you entered this space, you passed through an opening in a black-painted wall. Above that opening is the title of the exhibit, ...