History of the Collection
M. Eugene Rudd
Physics and astronomy were taught at the University of Nebraska from its very beginning in 1869. The first teacher was Samuel H. Aughey who had worked for Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution. Although his training was in botany and geology, he taught the courses in all of the sciences. Some apparatus for teaching physics was purchased, but little or none of it remains from the early period and few records exist to indicate what equipment was available.
Aughey was followed by a succession of teachers, usually trained in subjects other than physics, until 1887 when DeWitt Bristol Brace was hired. By contrast, Brace came with the best education available in physics at that time, having studied at Boston College, MIT, Johns Hopkins and finally doing his doctoral work in Berlin under Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff. Before his untimely death in 1905, Brace founded the Department of Physics and in addition did research on ether drift that brought him to the forefront of American physics.
Brace was able to purchase a considerable collection of instruments for use in lecture demonstrations, student laboratory work, and research. After his death, his successors continued to purchase apparatus, especially electrical, optical, and acoustical instruments, much of it of very high quality. The collection contains apparatus from manufacturers in Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Scotland, and England as well as in the United States.
Although some of the early apparatus has been lost or cannibalized over the years, a great deal of it was stored in attics, closets, and laboratory shelves, preserved under decades of dust. In the 1970s Professor Duane Jaecks recognized the historical value of some of the items and had several of the instruments were cleaned and restored. These were featured in an exhibition of historic scientific instruments held at Sheldon Art Gallery in 1978. Starting in 1998 I collected a large number of the instruments from various storage areas and gave them a preliminary cleaning. The room where most of them were kept was repainted and made useable as a sort of museum. In 2000-2001 I compiled an inventory of about 700 items.
Unfortunately, there are few remaining records that would tell anything about the date of purchase, price, or whether something was obtained directly from the manufacturer or through a supply company or importer. The Inventory Department of the university unwisely destroyed all records up to very recent times and records of payments for physics apparatus usually list only the total amount of an order and the company paid. The only useful records are some sets of inventory cards from about 1916 that were kept by the Physics Department. These were keyed to a department inventory system and if the instrument has that early inventory label a card can usually be found for it. However, the cards usually have little or no information other than the name and number of the item. Sometimes a card has the purchase price and a current value based on a stated depreciation rate. If so, one can calculate back to the approximate acquisition date.
Since the present museum room is rather inaccessible, we have put a couple dozen of the instruments in display cabinets scattered in the hallways of Brace Laboratory and Behlen Laboratory along with captions and some explanatory material. Occasionally some of the instruments are shown in talks to various student or departmental groups. We have even used some of them as conversation pieces at the tables during our annual recognition luncheons. It would be nice to have a permanent location for storage and display of the historic apparatus, but in the meantime we will have to be content to show them via this "Virtual Museum."