34 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



The division of agriculture and forest products has been principally 

 concerned with obtaining materials for the hall of forest products. 

 The Forest Products Laboratory, Department of Agriculture, Mad- 

 ison, Wis., gave a swellograph — a device that measures swelling 

 changes in wood having a finished surface. Larus & Brother Co., 

 Inc., reproduced a tobacco hogshead like those used 125 to 150 years 

 ago. Permali, Inc., contributed samples of machined parts for elec- 

 trical equipment and Fibron Products, Buffalo, N.Y., gave 17 hand- 

 some pieces of compressed wood products. To the agricultural collec- 

 tion has been added catalogs of agricultural implement companies 

 around 1880 belonging to Sylvanus D. Locke, the inventor of the 

 famous wire binder, Gordon Dentry donated a four-tined wooden 

 fork used by his grandfather and possibly his great-grandfather in 

 Baltimore County, Md. 



Armed Forces history. — A fine example of a Gatling gun was pre- 

 sented by the Armed Forces of Honduras. Mrs. George C. Marshall 

 presented several uniforms worn by General of the Army George C. 

 Marshall during World War 11. The division of naval history made 

 significant additions to the national collection of historic warship 

 models while projecting further units required to complete the hall of 

 armed forces history. Particularly notable was a rigged model of 

 Kobert Fulton's Steam Battery, the world's first steam man-of-war, 

 which was built by Adam and Noah Brown in 1814 for the defense of 

 New York. Plans for this 26-gun blockship were provided by How- 

 ard I. Chapelle who in 1961 discovered a contemporary draft of 

 the Steam Battery in the Danish Royal Archives at Copenhagen. By 

 happy coincidence, the division of naval history also received an origi- 

 nal Fulton draft of the armored torpedo boat Mute presented by 

 the family of George F. Brown, descendants of her versatile builders, 

 the Brown brothers of New York. The emergence of the steam navy 

 was further represented with the completion of a superb model of 

 the side-wheel steamer Powhatan, which served with Commodore 

 Perry in the opening of Japan. 



Through the generosity of the U.S. Coast Guard, the division of 

 naval history received a fully equipped beach cart of the type used by 

 the Life Saving Service for offshore rescue, a set of range lights from 

 Alaska, and an oil painting by Hunter Wood of the topsail schooner 

 Massachusetts, first cutter commissioned by the early Revenue Marine. 



A patent model of the revolutionary K-1 firing device, the heart of 

 the antenna mine employed in the North Sea mine barrage during 

 World War I, was presented by Mrs. Ralph C. Browne, widow of its 

 gifted inventor. Vivid memories of the Battle of Midway were evoked 

 by the bullet-torn flight jacket and combat decorations donated by 

 George H. Gay, sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8. 



