The Rosenwald Industrial Museum will not be just a technical museum, nor just an industrial exhibiting place, captivating to engineers and boring to most of us. It is to be a place where any individual of normal intelligence can see the effects that scientific and industrial progress in the machine age have had and are likely to have upon him and the world he lives in, declared Waldemar Kaempffert, director of the museum, when He returned to Chicago from a four months’ visit to the important technical museums of Europe.
“If you were to step into the average old-world museum you probably would marvel at the exhibits and the models on display,” he said. “Probably you’d have a vague idea that it was all very great. But the chances are you’d say to yourself, ‘What does all this mean to me?’
“And we don’t want any one to say that when he comes to the Rosenwald Industrial museum.”
He had nothing but respect for those old-world museums. Still, he wanted it understood that the institution here is not going to “Copy” any of them.
“I have been studying them because they have so much experience and we need to learn from them, “said Mr. Kaempfffert. “But the Rosenwald museum is to be fundamentally different from anything in the world.”
“Our fundamental idea will be to show how life has been affected by the machine. Nowhere, at any time, has such an attempt been made in any similar institution. Every institution has to have some fundamental idea-and that is ours.
“We will not be content merely to show machines. Take say the elevator. Who is interested in an elevator? It is important, but does it grip the average man’s attention? Well, it should, and we intend to make it grip him. We will do that by demonstrating to him the vital social conditions and problems that have been created by the elevator. The elevator is responsible for our skyscraper cities, skyscrapers are responsible for our congested rush-hour crowds. Because of those crowds we have our difficult modern traction problem. We expect to show visitors to the museum how all that has grown out of the invention of the elevator.”
Thousands of models, most of which can be set in motion, will be on display. Mr. Kaempffert estimates that altogether there will be at least $30,000,000 worth of exhibits within a few years, including donations from industries. The museum can be opened two or three years from now if the remodelling of the Fine Arts Building to house the museum goes ahead promptly, he said.
Meanwhile the director, as a result of his European trip, intends to have (Continued on Page 4)
construction of models started immediately.
“When I found out how many months had been taken up by ‘paper work’ over there I realized that we’d have to get busy here at once in order to be ready when we want to,” he said. “Building these models, you know, is to be quite a thing in itself. Many of them will cost from $10,000 to $100,000 each.”
“One of the big ones will be the Panama canal model,” he continued. “There will be real water in it, a real canal, real miniature ships, real electric haulage equipment, real locks that will lift the ships, just as they do at Panama. It will be a genuine, working replica of what you see at the actual canal.
“Then there must be another model, as well as explanatory material, to show what the canal means. We must stick to that purpose always-showing the meaning of the thing. In the case of the Panama canal we must have some kind of accompanying model that will make people realize how much longer it took to go around South America than to go through that little canal, and we must have figures demonstrating the way the canal has cut down costs.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
