Featured on PDR in the collection The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie’s Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian (1890–1913)

When Thomas William Smillie (1843–1917) was designated “custodian” of the Smithsonian Institution’s photographic “specimens” in 1896 — a position we might now call curator of photography — it was the first such appointment at any museum in the United States, and perhaps in the world. Until his death, the Scottish-born chemist would dedicate his life to building and presenting the Smithsonian’s collections, whose far-flung gamut, as Merry Foresta described it, included such categories as “ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous.”