Harvard's Scientific Instrument Collection Opens an Exhibit on How Measurement Tools Served Racism and Eugenics

Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments has opened a special exhibition examining how scientific tools were used to classify people by race and lend authority to racist ideas, including eugenics, The Harvard Crimson reported in a magazine feature published Friday.

The exhibition, "Measurement on the Color Line," opened Oct. 15 and brings together medical instruments, historical documents and photographs from the 19th century to the present, according to the Crimson. It was curated by Evelynn M. Hammonds, a former dean of Harvard College and a professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies.

The exhibition is guided by a question Hammonds often asks, said Joshua M. Gorman, the collection's executive director: "If race is the answer, what was the question?" "What were we actually looking for here?" Gorman said, according to the Crimson. To assemble it, staff acquired instruments that were historically used to measure human bodies and sort them by race, including more than 100 anthropometric tools from Harvard's Peabody Museum and old gene sequencing equipment from biology laboratories.

One object is a multicolored toy top. The toymaker and educator Milton Bradley manufactured "The Pupil's Color Top" to teach color theory to elementary school students, who could place pieces of colored paper on it and watch the colors blend as it spun. In 1910, the eugenicist Charles Davenport used the top to study what he described in his notes as "the color of the skin of descendants of matings between negroes and Caucasians," according to the Crimson.

The collection, housed in Zimmer Hall, holds more than 20,000 decommissioned research tools, including hundreds of microscopes and the largest collection of sundials in North America, as well as items ranging from a mounted fish specimen to a Nobel Prize medal, the Crimson reported. It closed for several weeks of renovations in August and reopened at the end of September with new explanatory plaques and redesigned displays.

Gorman said the collection was originally a "science museum for scientists," but that 70 percent of visitors are now tourists who come across it, sometimes after finding an unlocked door while looking for a restroom or "a Harvard story." Before the renovation, objects in the permanent exhibition were labeled with little more than their names. "The idea was that instruments could speak for themselves, which, of course, I regard as an absurd notion," Gorman said.

Without historical context, he said, the collection risked telling "a triumphant story of colonial science." The new displays trace how Harvard's scientific practices changed over time, including its role in scientific racism and colonial expansion. Surveying instruments, for example, reflect the university's early role in training the sons of wealthy landowners who were "at the bleeding edge of empire" to map and navigate new territory, according to the Crimson.

The changes appear to be keeping visitors longer. Last November, staff estimated visitors spent an average of 11 minutes in the gallery; Gorman said they now often stay more than half an hour.

The collection is also trying to become a teaching resource. Taking inspiration from Harvard's art museums and libraries, staff are building ties with first-year seminars and contacting courses across departments that deal with race and descent, the history of medicine and contemporary medicine, the Crimson reported. A group from the Harvard Graduate School of Design recently studied surveying instruments to learn about the representation of physical space. "We have things in our life, but we don't necessarily have the skills to untangle how they're made, why they're made, and how they shape the ways that we use them," Gorman said.

Donations have grown with the collection's profile, often from laboratories cleared out when faculty retire or die. The permanent exhibition includes the microscope that Martin Karplus, a Harvard chemistry professor emeritus and 2013 Nobel laureate, used as a teenager and through college; his family arranged the donation after his death in 2024. The collection now uses a proposal form asking donors why an object matters, where it came from and whether they have the legal authority to give it.

Its most talked-about recent acquisition is a gorilla suit, acquired last spring, that was used in a famous selective attention experiment at Harvard's Department of Psychology in 1999. In the video, viewers are told to count basketball passes while a person in a gorilla suit walks through the players and thumps his chest; about half of viewers miss the gorilla entirely. History of science faculty were more excited about the suit than any other acquisition, Gorman said, and staff hope to display it in the permanent gallery beginning in April 2028. He called it "kind of a conservation nightmare" because its cheap plastic face has partly melted.

"These objects have lives," Gorman said. The goal, he said, is to preserve "as much of that entire spectrum of the life of an object as we can."