The Science History Institute Museum is closed for renovations.
The Othmer Library remains open by appointment.

Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

As Good as Gold

Why do we still study the color of urine?

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Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.

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Arts & Culture

It’s a Mad, Mad World: Dow and the Age of Consumption

In the years following World War II, chemical companies sold not only products but a lifestyle.

Arts & Culture

Strange Things

In a time of rapid technological change and globalization, separating the fake from the real was not always easy. Sound familiar?

hand holding a pen and drawing
Arts & Culture

Comic Drama: Illustrating the Manhattan Project

Author and illustrator Jonathan Fetter-Vorm tells the stories of science through comics and graphic novels.

Arts & Culture

A Successful Failure

Silly Putty’s serious past.

gloved hand mixing ingredients for an experiment
Early Science & Alchemy

Making and Knowing (Fake) Coral

Watch historians re-create a recipe for imitation coral, a popular material in early modern jewelry and home décor.

Health & Medicine

The Machiavelli Microbe

Can a parasite in your cat’s litter box take control of your mind?

Inventions & Discoveries

A Cloudy Past

Before today’s cell-phone, laptop, and TV screens, there was a whiskey advertisement.

Environment

The Best of Intentions

The origins and unintended consequences of U.S. forest-fighting policy.

Environment

A Vulnerable Earth

Through attempts to weaponize Earth itself, Cold War researchers unintentionally created a new understanding of a fragile planet.

Environment

Living in the Town Asbestos Built

Nearly a century of asbestos manufacturing carried the borough of Ambler, Pennsylvania, from bust to boom and back to bust. In recent years Ambler has gotten back on its feet, but its industrial past remains very much present.

Arts & Culture

The Artist in the Laboratory

Albert Edelfelt broke the rules when he painted his friend Louis Pasteur in the scientist’s natural element.

Inventions & Discoveries

Hard-Headed Man

When William Aspdin stumbled on the secret to modern concrete, it was the first and one of the few fortuitous steps in an unsteady life.

People & Politics

A Brief History of Chemical War

For more than 2,000 years human ingenuity has turned natural and synthetic poisons into weapons of war.

Inventions & Discoveries

Life and Death

A tour through the history of radioisotopes, used to study and treat disease and to unlock the secrets of DNA and photosynthesis.

Arts & Culture

Blast from the Past: Atomic Age Jewelry and the Feminine Ideal

Designers of the 1950s took up the atom and turned it into a fashion icon.

Inventions & Discoveries

The Strange, Gruesome Search for Substance X

John Hughes worked his way through uncounted pig brains to find the human body’s natural painkiller.

People & Politics

Chemical Warfare: From the European Battlefield to the American Laboratory

In 1916 the United States sent its first official observer to the trenches of Europe, where he found a new kind of warfare.

People & Politics

The Blockade Runner

During the Napoleonic Wars one man in particular kept scientific knowledge flowing between enemies.