National Air and Space Museum Association

The National Air and Space Museum Association is represented in the novel through the Smithsonian Institution, whose history and public mission Peter Solomon presents as a national commitment to knowledge. Founded on a bequest from James Smithson, it grows in the account from an early science museum into a network of museums along the National Mall. Solomon describes it not merely as a collection of buildings and exhibits but as a continuing tribute to a vision of enlightenment grounded in education, scientific advancement, and freedom of thought.

Origins and Founding Vision

In a presentation to students at Phillips Exeter Academy, Solomon traces the Institution to James Smithson, a wealthy British scientist who left a substantial fortune to the United States. Smithson’s bequest, as Solomon recounts it, carried a specific purpose: the establishment of “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The Institution’s national role thus begins in the story as both a gift and an educational charge: scientific knowledge is not to remain the possession of a private elite but to be increased and shared.

Solomon places that gift within a wider account of the country’s founding ideals. He tells the students that Smithson, like the American founders, believed the young nation could become a land of enlightenment. The presentation connects the Institution’s scientific mission with a broader civic aspiration, while making clear that this is Solomon’s interpretation of the founders’ legacy. He describes the founders as deeply religious but Deist in outlook, and says that the religious ideal they advanced was freedom of religion. In his account, education and scientific progress are compatible with spirituality, and neither requires the suppression of other beliefs.

The Castle and Its Collections

The Institution’s history takes visible form in the Smithsonian Castle, introduced in Solomon’s presentation as a striking, castle-like building of red sandstone, square towers, and Gothic details. A sepia image first prompts a student to guess that it stands in England; a later photograph reveals the white dome of the United States Capitol nearby, locating the apparent medieval castle in Washington. Solomon dates the castle’s presence in the capital to 1855 and presents it as America’s first real science museum.

His account makes the early museum vivid through its contents. The building held basement science laboratories and exhibit-lined corridors, as well as a salon of mollusks, biological specimens in glass jars, archaeological artifacts, animal skeletons, and plaster casts of prehistoric reptiles. The collection joined different fields of inquiry under one roof, turning the castle into a public display of scientific and historical knowledge. Solomon also recalls the curators who called themselves “the curators of crustaceans,” and the castle’s two well-known resident owls, Diffusion and Increase, both deceased by the time of his talk. These details give the institution’s early history a domestic and human scale alongside its grand founding purpose.

Growth into a National Institution

Solomon’s slide show moves from the castle’s early rooms and collections to a satellite image of the National Mall lined with large Smithsonian museums. The contrast establishes institutional growth: what began in the story with a bequest and a single conspicuous building has become a broad public presence at the center of the capital. The castle remains a point of origin, but the Institution’s reach is now legible across the Mall.

The presentation’s structure reinforces this movement from particular objects to national meaning. Solomon begins with the architectural puzzle of the castle, guides his audience through its former laboratories and displays, and concludes with the expanded museum landscape. The Institution’s scale is therefore conveyed not only through statements about its mission but through the images that show its development. For the students, the Smithsonian is at once a historical inheritance and a working institution encountered in the present.

Public Meaning in the Novel

Solomon calls the Smithsonian Institution a symbol of science and knowledge at the core of America and a living tribute to the founders’ dream. His language gives the organization a role beyond preserving exhibits: it stands for the continued public value of learning, wisdom, and scientific inquiry. The emphasis on diffusion in Smithson’s bequest resonates with the talk’s audience, a group of students being invited to see national history as an active educational project rather than a remote inheritance.

The scene also places Solomon’s institutional authority within a conversation about religion and scientific progress. When a student challenges his description of the founders’ outlook, he does not frame religious commitment and scientific development as mutually exclusive. Instead, he presents religious freedom, mass education, and the advancement of science as parts of a common civic vision. In this account, the Institution embodies that vision through its history, collections, and continued public presence.