Museum Cases Around Campus Being Updated by History Dept. Students

The history of NJIT will become more prominent around campus and online in the next couple of semesters, as a team including two students, a librarian and a historian are working to digitize and expand existing artifact displays.

Their goals are to reorganize, digitize and expand the university's museum, which is currently presented in display cases throughout several buildings, and do the same with the Van Houten Library's Edward Weston collection, presented in display cases on multiple floors.

"I'd like the students to know that we're doing this for them. The idea here is that NJIT in some ways feels like a place without history. It feels sometimes like a place outside history where it's always chasing the new technologies. We are doing this for students to give them a sense of the history and the importance of NJIT," explained Neil Maher, chair of the history department.

Maher acknowledged the lack of space at NJIT for a central museum to display and study artifacts, but observed that a distributed museum has an advantage in that more people will see it. However, at some point a central storage facility will be needed, he said.

The museum effort began in 2017 through a chance meeting between Robert Barat, who teaches in the chemical and materials engineering department, and Elizabeth Petrick, who taught in the history department before departing for Rice University in 2019. Barat contributed many artifacts, such as test and measurement equipment used throughout his career, while they both reached out to colleagues with a message to save, not throw away, older equipment which might be culturally or historically relevant to NJIT, its predecessor Newark College of Engineering or even the original Newark Technical School.

Display cases began popping up around the campus, but the artifacts placed in them are not arranged in themes and they are not documented online. To work on this second phase of the project, Maher interviewed students and selected Alanur Akarsu, a senior double major in history and political science at Rutgers University-Newark, for the independent study which more closely resembles a museum internship. (The history department is federated across Rutgers-Newark and NJIT, although Maher himself is based on the NJIT side.)

"Technology is just as amazing as any other history, in my opinion," said Akarsu, who is hoping to pursue a museum career. She's been learning to use Digital Commons, which is a cloud-based archiving service. Her plan is to work on digitization first. Currently the objects are randomly placed in display cases, so her next task will be to rearrange them into themed exhibits.

Akarsu said her initial steps with Digital Commons led her to find inspiration from other universities, including Rockefeller University (New York) which posted digital records of its own scientific artifacts collection.

Her favorite artifact here at NJIT is the Macintosh Plus located in the third-floor display case in Fenster Hall. That system was the third generation of Apple's Mac lineup, circa 1986, and had a starting price of $2,599 when new or about $6,200 adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars. It came with one megabyte of RAM, 10 times the 128 kilobytes of the original 1984 version. The computer was donated by Marek Rusinkiewicz, former dean of Ying Wu College of Computing, who retired in 2016.

History graduate student Zack Kellet is doing the brunt of the library work in parallel to Akarsu’s project. He completed a B.S. at NJIT majoring in science, technology and society, and is now a graduate student in history, also based at Rutgers-Newark. Kellet's assignment is to upload photographs, data and context about library artifacts, mostly related to Edward Weston. There are more than 250 artifacts, and Kellet is expected to get through several dozen of them.

Most people at NJIT only know Weston (pronounced West-on, not Westin like the hotel chain) by the building named for him and his son, which now houses Hillier College of Architecture and Design and in the 1960-1970s was home to the university's computer center. Weston (1850-1936) was a chemist, prolific inventor, peer of Thomas Edison, entrepreneur and most notably an original board member of Newark Technical School.

Weston developed a lightbulb filament which lasted longer than Edison's, wound up making money selling dynamos and developed a type of battery that in 1911 became the industry's official standard for calibrating voltage. The standard wasn't superseded until 1990. This and other test-and-measurement products led to his reputation as the face of that field — you can think of him as the godfather of the multimeter. Weston was also known in his time for expertise on the legal side of being an inventor. He became so busy at defending himself against patent lawsuits from competitors, and at filing patent lawsuits against those competitors, that he wound up with lucrative work as a patent consultant, Kellet said.

Kellet is working with NJIT's Matthew Brown, digital projects librarian, who already started archiving in Digital Commons for subjects such as theses and dissertations as far back as 1928; syllabi; accreditation and planning documents; and assorted special collections. The latter include Nucleus yearbooks, the library's annual reports, technical reports of NJIT's Electronic Information Exchange System which was a 1970-1980s social media ancestor, along with a 1930-1940s collection of Newark College of Engineering newsletters.

Looking at the big picture, Maher noted that history offers valuable lessons for all fields by teaching us to understand the context and implications of everything from global current events to daily business decisions. "What history does is it teaches you to read, write and think analytically, to question and to formulate answers not just to the facts of what happened, but to the why," he said. "What did it mean? What was the impact of those events? And if you can think that way ... then it's going to help you whether you're an engineer or a biologist or a computer scientist."

Science can teach you to clone a T-rex, the saying goes, but liberal arts can teach you why that's not a wise idea.

"I think that at a place like this, sometimes people forget that," Maher said. "All these technologies, all these material artifacts, are from our community here," Maher observed. "If we can put those into historical context, students cannot only be pursuing their future careers, but also doing so within a space that reminds them of the deep and important past here at NJIT."

Maher and Brown are hopeful that other students can continue the projects after Akarsu and Kellet graduate.

They also both credited Provost Fadi Deek for helping to coalesce their goals and pull the right levers that made their dreams a reality.

"I got this going, but many of us had thought of this and wondered what can we do at a polytechnic university where apparatus is out there so quickly that we tend to throw away things," Deek commented.

Deek said he didn't want to risk losing that history. He also credited Andrew Christ, senior vice president for real estate development and capital operations, with the assist for help with logistics.

"I noticed that some offices were cluttered and had things in them that I used myself in projects decades ago," Deek said. "Some, from a display and legacy point of view, may be both valuable and interesting for our students who may not have seen a typewriter."