end the north korean nuclear threat, i believe the united states is at peace tonight in part because of the discipline, careful, effective deployment of our military resources. and at 6:00 p.m. eastern on american artifacts, we'll take a tour of arlington house, with national park service ranger matthew penrod built by george washington's step grandson it was the home of robert e. lee who married into the family. >> he declared this house a federalist house, this was to represent all the beliefs and ideals of george washington, and that included once again the idea that this nation would exist forever. and that no state had a right to leave it. so how ironic is it that that man's daughter would marry robert e. lee who became the great confederate general and perhaps the man who came closest than any other man in history to

destroying the nation that was created in the american revolution. >> for our complete american history tv schedule, go to c-span.org. >> each week, american artifacts takes you to museums and historic places to learn what artifacts reveal about american history. next, we tour the innovation wing of the national museum of american history in washington, d.c. museum director john gray shows us some of his favorite objects, including an 1896 bicycle embellished with gold, silver and jewels by tiffany and company. and the 1948 tucker automobile. we also hear historical background from curator kathleen franz. welcome to the smithsonian's national museum of american history and it is really wonderful to welcome you in to our new floor that is looking at innovation and invention in

america. and to start with that, we have some extraordinary patent models and examples of early invention and contemporary invention. we even have apple 1 up here, which is quite extraordinary. so you'll see as we walk through the floor, the ways in which america has been so inventive and continues that invention is one of the most important parts of our country. so let's walk through. as you come through, you start to see all these exhibitions that are focused on ways in which we have developed a new way of thinking and new way of being, almost since time. here we have the value of money, which has most extraordinary collection of gold and silver coins, paper, but all of them are oriented in a way to help understand the role of money. we end up with a bitcoin. so you can see over time how we

understand value, trade, exchange as we go forward. and now we walk in to part of the show where we have american enterprise, talking about the social and cultural history, which is really your history, of capitalism, business, the common good. but before we get to that, here's one of my most favorite objects, the tucker car, in mint condition, which when it came out in 1948 and 1949 was a total innovation, everything which i love is the front light, the center front light that goes out, to the ways in which it was styled, and actually the ways in which it was to operate. so you can see within this the role of invention and you can also see within this the stories of business where some people were very successful, and created a market and some people weren't. so it is an important item to

understand in america the ways in which we as people have dominated how we understand one another. and then this cart, what is called the red river cart, is an extraordinary story of matee women out of canada bringing in pelts into the area around st. paul to trade and what they were doing was circumventing the hudson bay monopoly and obviously the hudson bay monopoly didn't like that. so there was a lawsuit and ultimately the women prevailed. so here we're starting out a show about american enterprise, talking about women who came across the border, which really was undefined back then, in order to create their own livelihood. and so you can start to see the ways in which we can tell your stories of american business. and as we continue to walk through here, we start with the section that is called the

merchant era, you start to realize how global trade existed from time in memorial and in america the start of the country really had enormous amounts of trade that were going on, starr colonial era and past that. on the side over here, we have our advertising wall, which shows from a period of time to today when we developed the idea of how to promote products and how to promote really consumerism. and you start with some things that are stereotypical, but you go to the way identities develop and how we do that. you then come into the corporate era, which is quite extraordinary because you see the development of unbelievable businesses. some bases on consumerism, like mr. wonderful peanut. this actually was on a fence post in iowa, because you started to see how we promoted

our own products. coming through here, you walk into the consumer era. and here's where we start to identify our current lives, whether it's the way cars are developed or the ways in which energy got exploited and actually had a greater impact. and after that, we go into the global era. and as part of this overall show, there are numerous areas in which you can learn more about the country and things that have really affected us, and one of the most popular objects is right here. we see the concept that lower taxation can increase everyone's income. what's fascinating about this, when he drew this out, he was the donald rumsfeld, the vibe rnlt part of our history that has influenced all of our politics, our economic decisions

today represented right there. and behind that, the friedman brief case. as you come through this extraordinary exhibition, you can learn more about not only the country, but you can learn about what affects you every day. so we leave american enterprise and we go into an educational area, and we call it "object project" because it's these objects that literally change the way people live and behave. and the numerous ones from a refrigerator unit that actually changed the way we eat and how women could behave because they could prepare food and put it in there, to bicycles. and what's a real instructive way to think of the innovation of bicycles because it changed mobility for everybody. particularly changed mobility for women, and it changed the way they dressed and the way they were able to navigate a different kind of world.

and one of the most beautiful objects and certainly something everybody is going to want to come see is the way tiffany with silver and jewels decorated this bicycle that then became symbolic for women, particularly this one, in their quest for mobility and the way they could identify their own independence that developed over a period of time. so here we have "spark lab." and the reality of invention is people doing the actual work. our spark lab takes children of all ages and actually can teach them and have them experiment with their development and the understanding of how to invent, whether it's around sound or music or lighting or electricity, and that is an enormous place of creativity for us as we come through. so you have to think about what it means for you to be an inventor and who are these inventors. so here we actually have the

studio or workshop of ralph baird, who actually invented pong, which was the first interactive tv program, and look at today, how many interactive programs there are. and through this, you can learn about the fight and how you preserve your intellectual rights through patent models. you can also learn about how technology started in one place and just grew and grew in america. what i love most about this is actually his sweater. because he was a real human being who escaped from germany, came and found himself as one of the great inventors of all kinds of things in his america. and so what we're trying to do here is explain how america and actually the world has seen innovation and invention and how it's been captured from the start of this country into today, and continues to be such a major component of how we live, how we think, and how we act.

so now, you really get the exciting privilege of listening to curators talk about individual objects, and it's the kind of experience you will have when you come and visit this wonderful, wonderful innovation. >> i'm kathleen franz. i'm the business history curator here at the national museum of american history smithsonian institution. and we're here in the object project today. looking at some of the amazing objects that have come out of storage and that you can interact with. i'm here with the tiffany bicycle. it is a super blingy example of a safety bicycle that was introduced in 1895 by tiffany and company for christmas, for the holiday market, and for the very distinguished and very wealthy buyer. this is not a common bicycle used by everybody. but the form that it is, which are two wheels of about the same size, is something that was new

on the market, but aimed at a more middle class audience. so objects can tell us lots of different stories. and this bike is just packed full of stories. i'll just share a couple of them with you. one is that biking was a craze in the 1880s and 1890s, but bikes come first and then automobiles. they overlap a little bit, but bikes really paved the way, literally, to better roads in the u.s. so bikers are forming clubs and groups and they go out in their spare time and they bike across the countryside and they realize that the roads in the 1880s and 1890s leave something to be desired. so they form good roads clubs. and that eventually develops into highway systems and paved roads. so that comes out of biking. it's also these bikes are an innovation from the earlier version which is the high-wheel

bicycle. where the rider basically sits on top of one big wheel with a sort of small supporting wheel behind it. those are ridden mostly by men. mostly for sport. and mostly to test themselves and test bicycles. when these come along, it really opens up biking to both men and women. and that's another one of the important stories that we tell here, is that this is a moment in the 1880s, 1890s, where middle-class women are starting to embrace this idea of sufferage, and moving outside the boundaries of the home and taking on new roles in public, and the bike really allows for that, and it also becomes a symbol of women's independence. just to get on this bike, you had to wear shorter skirts, sensible shoes, and so it was an instrument in helping to change women's fashion but made them more mobile as well. it also becomes a symbol for

women's suffrage, and people moving that movement point to the bike as one of the things that gives women a new kind of mobility and independence. lastly, if we look closely at the object itself, why is it so fancy? well, tiffany's is trying to cater to its market of very wealthy people. the 1890s is one of those moments in american history when a lot of wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a few americans, and they have a lot to spend. the vanderbilts, the carnegies, those folks, and they're buying lavish things to show off that wealth. this definitely shows off your wealth. this was for a pretty wealthy woman in montgomery, alabama. it also has a lot of filigree and decoration. you can tell just when you walk up this is not your average bike. so we're in the corporate era of

american enterprise. and thinking about inventors and innovation, and i'm here with thomas edison, and what the curators call the creepy baby doll. these are two of edison's inventions. one is the light bulb, which is really made his career in many ways. it's the thing we know most about edison. this incandescent bulb invented in 1879 really changed the landscape of american cities and indeed american life. this doll was a real failure, and one of the interesting things about edison, a man known as the wizard of menlo park for his more than 1,000 patents and his many, many successes, also had a tremendous failure along the way. it was this doll, which was remarkable for its time because it was a talking baby doll, and when it's invented in the 1890s,

it's one of the first applications of recorded sound in children's toys. and you can see here, this is basically a very small phonograph with a wax cylinder which is also edison and several other people's inventions and it's trumped down to a very small size to fit inside the doll. and a child would crank this from the back, and it would sing one nursery rhyme. you could hear it through this sort of perforated chest of the doll. now, these dolls would have had hair. they would have had clothing on. ours is a little bit stripped down. the problem with this was actually there were several problems. one is that it was incredibly expensive. so it was $10 to $20 in the 1890s, which was just more than the average family or average consumer could spend. it was a very high priced item.

but the worst thing was that it just didn't work. so when it was launched on the market, the crank fell off. the sound didn't work. and if the sound did work, it was really a very shrill, screaming nursery rhyme. not a very plez nlt, something that would put you to sleep at night. the sound was recorded by women who worked in edison factory. in new jersey, and the recording technology is not at all like what we would have today. so they would have to sing the nursery rhyme at a very high volume for the wax cylinder to pick it up and record it. so it was sort of like the screaming baby doll. unfortunately, edison only sold a very small number of these, and then ended up with almost 2,000, i think the number is like 1,700 dolls in a warehouse.

in new jersey. and he called them his little monsters because they were one of his greatest failures and sort of plagued his dreams, but he bounces back. that's why we have this story in american enterprise. just to show you success and also failures. most entrepreneurs, most inventors experience some failure. it's just how they overcome it. this is also a nice parallel with earl tucker's story, the inventor of tupperware that you'll hear about later in the story. he had a lot of failures and one tremendous success, which was tupperware. we're standing in front of our 1960 hot point refrigerator, which is a beautiful aqua blue, and contains some brightly colored behind me tupperware. i'm here to tell you a little bit about the back story on its namesake, earl tupper.

earl tupper is what i would say a classic independent american inventor. he grew up thinking that he would become famous through his inventions and his inventions would make him a millionaire. he was born in new hampshire. and then moved to western massachusetts, which was really a hub for inventors. and his parents were sort of small farmers. and they lived, you know, a sort of hard scrabble life. this is his diary, from the 1930s. he graduates from high school in 1925. he has a very active imagination and mind. he couldn't afford to go to college, but again, he thinks about becoming this inventor. and he keeps a notebook, actually, he keeps several notebooks and we have them at the museum. this is invention diary and sketch book where he's recording his ideas.

earl tupper, shirley, massachusetts. and then, i think this is so fascinating, this first page starts with my purpose in life. and he really outlines sort of his goals for his career as an inventor. and then goes on and on. this diary is from the 1930s, as i said, and it really is -- he's inventing and trying to start a business inventing in probably the worst moment in american history, which is 1933, when 25% of americans are out of work. there are dozens of inventions in here. he tries all sorts of things, from personal care products like pocket combs to corsets, to my favorite, which is a rumble seat protector. so he's doing add-ons to cars, something that would keep you dry when you're sitting in your

car. that's one thing that he tries to patent it. he protects the idea, and he tried to market it. and he runs into the same problems that most independent inventors face, which were the capital to produce the invention, to actually manufacture it. but then also, the money and the knowledge to market it, to bring it to a market so that people would buy it. and you see his struggles with those things throughout the diary. okay. so let me put this underneath my cart and i'm going to bring out some of the other objects that we have in a very large earl tupper collection. so this is his patent, much later, for tupperware, for the sealable bowl. this is 1957. so now he's moved forward in time. this is a product spot that

would have been done by the tupper company of their early products. this is when tupperware was all white and not in colors yet. and then this is a pretty unusual and rare photograph of earl tupper at his desk talking to probably an engineer about the production of tupperware. and the many different forms that it would come in, because they didn't just make these, what were called bowls, but we're probably mostly familiar with, and not even these. he really expands into an entire line of specialized containers, some of which are actually behind me. a salad dressing container, and my favorite, the millionaire drink shaker, so you could make your cocktails and keep them in the fridge without spilling. plastics are really a 20th century material. they are new.

and so he has an early encounter with dupont, the big plastics and dupont makes a lot of things including gun powder in this period, and they have a subsidiary in massachusetts, and so he works there for about a year. and then after world war ii, he gets a piece of polyethylene, which is a much more flexible plastic. and he actually invents from that an even more flexible and translucent plastic. this is all sort of post-world war ii, just as the consumer market for these things are really taking off. and he sort of enters that market with this new product and with a new material. american consumers and the women who did most of the buying for the home were really skeptical about plastic containers. they would much rather, even

after world war ii, inclined to use glass. it was easier to clean. they thought about plastics, again, as like fragile or brittle or stinky like the plastic itself had an odor, or that they would not be clean or easy to clean. and glass was all of those things. so tupper faced not just an invention challenge but a marketing challenge. like how to get women to buy the plastic container over the glass container. so earl tupper had a great product. but he didn't have a great way to sell it. and a lot of independent inventors and indeed companies struggle with how to market their goods. especially if they're new on the market. if consumers haven't seen them before. what earl tupper does is he tries a number of selling venues. one is department stores. he places his products there, and it falls flat. people are not buying it because there's really nobody to tell you, again, what the benefits of the product are.

eventually, he figures out that family home products, which is a direct consumer sales, somebody who knocks on your door and says do you want to buy these products and demonstrates them for you, was really, there were a few sales people who were really moving tupperware. one was brownie weisz. a woman who really was a gifted salesperson herself and a big personality. she would come out of world war ii where she worked in an airplane factory, and then took up home sales as a way to support herself. earl tupper hears about her. here they are, and eventually, makes her vice president of the company in charge of sales. and she moves the sales wing to florida. and she really does several things that are innovative. one is she sells with women to other women. and she noerincorporates this k of stay at home domestic woman

who is a mother and a wife or just a wife, as a way to make a little extra money on the side for things that they might want to buy. and that gives women a tremendous incentive to sell. and she taps into that. she also creates all sorts of other incentives and annual conference where the top sellers get really fabulous prizes like fur coats and new cars. and really gets the sales force into the culture of tupperware and into selling. and a lot of fun, these things were themed. the parties were like landing on the moon space themed party or caveman party. she makes it really, really fun. we have a couple of other sales literature things that were given out to the saleswomen. so here's a demonstration. and this really all hinged on the demonstration, again, women who were the main shoppers for

the home were not necessarily sold on plastic containers. but if they got why they would keep fresh food fresher longer in a sealed container and why plastic had some benefits, then they would buy. and here's another piece of sales literature in our collection. it's a great color palette. and here are the fabulous products. and here's our millionaire drink shaker here that's in the refrigerator. you could own them in different colors, which was also a sales technique. so that's why this story is in the consumer era section of american enterprise. this is -- the era is really 1945 to the 1970s. and it's a moment when americans across the board really have more money. so there is a middle class again. but from the 19 -- late 1920s through the 1930s, the

depression and then through the world war ii years, americans just didn't have a lot of money to spend on consumer purchases. the depression, people are out of work, during the war there's rationing so people have more money, but there's fewer things to buy. now, finally, after world war ii, americans have a little bit more money in their pockets, and they are spending it on houses, on appliances, and on things to fill those appliances and live the good life in america, which they computed with consumption. you have seen only a small part of our innovation wing today, but it's a permanent exhibition and there are more stories, more objects, and more american history if you come down to visit us. thank you very much. >> you can watch this and other american artifacts programs by visiting our website,

c-span.org/history. american history tv airs on c-span3 every weekend, telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations. this month, american history tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts takes a look at the treasures at u.s. historic sites, museums, and archives. reel america, revealing the 20th century through archival films and news reels. the civil war, where you hear about the people who shaped the civil war and reconstruction. and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies, and legacies. all this month in primetime and every weekend on american history tv on c-span3. >> each week, american history tv's american artifactsis