Museum pieces

We (son and I) did the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The air conditioning is nice. They had a lot of neat old things like antique vacuum cleaners, early electric motors and generators, steam engines, cars. No planes, those are all over at Air and Space. The curators must be on a super greenie tear. No lights in a lot of cases making it impossible to see the stuff in the case and/or read the tags. Surely the US of A can afford the electricity to light museum cases.
The curators also have a bit of trouble writing tags. They have a groovy old telescope hanging from the ceiling. It's all polished hardwood and brass, about 15 feet long. The tag talks about Maria somebody-or-other famous woman astronomer who used this gadget at Vassar and is credited with discovering a comet. Didn't bother to say if the telescope was a reflector or a refractor, how big the mirror or lens was, how it was aimed and tracked, whether it could do photography. We learned a lot about lady astronomer Dr. Maria somebody-or-other of Vasser but little about the telescope hanging from the ceiling. Maybe they should have had her hanging from the ceiling, properly stuffed of course.
Then it can make you feel old. In the electric gadget display they had a pair of electric socks. I can remember when my father gave my mother just such a set of battery powered socks. In the GM sponsored automobile display they had some classics, including our old family car, an '88 Dodge Caravan. 22 year old son commented that it made him feel old to see the family car in a museum.