Exhibitions | The Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop

Classic toy trains produced by New Haven's A.C. Gilbert Company still run beautifully after 50 years. See them in action at the Eli Whitney Museum's annual hands on exhibition of American Flyer Trains. Learn More

Thursday, April 23, 2009

15th Leonardo Challenge: Unruly Invention

Play with the ruler's materials, its edges, its calibrations... or its meanings. Let your imagination rule. Learn more...

Friday, November 28, 2008

Magnetic Fun and Facts

Gilbert introduced his first magnetism set in 1923. In 2008, Alex Kronman redesigned the Gilbert magnet experiments to preserve the tradition of curious exploration for a new generation of young hands. Learn more...

Friday, November 28, 2008

2008 Holiday Trains

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Keys to Creativity

The Challenge: Find a key. Twist the key or its meaning. Insert or duplicate or cut or connect or color or conceal keys. Assemble new forms. Unlock new meanings. Let the keys start something. Learn more...

Friday, November 23, 2007

Gilbert the Competitor

Gilbert's experience in the fourth Olympics is a story of sport, Yale, educational trends, social movements, the Olympics as an institution, politics, and a bold young man who loved to compete. Learn more...

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Playing Hands

Leonardo and the printing press were born in the same year. The first transformation of that revolutionary communications technology was, of course, games. Playing cards, made uniform and inexpensive by Gutenberg's press, spoke a universal, popular language. Learn more...

Thursday, April 6, 2006

Rein of Invention

Chain is as ancient as Hepaestus, the artisan god of the forge. It is an essential tool of the blacksmith’s art. With rings and hooks of chain, a blacksmith tethers the world. Leonardo draws chains as he dissects the anatomy of invention. Learn More

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Champion of Champions

Alfred Gilbert was born in 1884 in Salem, Oregon. About the same time, in Western Germany, Max von Stephanitz began to standardize a breed of yellow and grey wolf-like working dog that would become the German Shepherd. It became an icon of a simpler, purer time. Learn more...

Thursday, April 7, 2005

Remarkable Invention

Just as the printing press spread reading across Renaissance Europe,the pencil spread writing. Wood or metal or paper supported a carbon and clay stylus ever ready to mark, cipher, or draw. Learn more...

Friday, November 26, 2004

Eye Contact

A. C. Gilbert graduated from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1909. Gilbert trained to be a physician just as modern scientific medicine... and the microscope... displaced 19th century practical medicine. Gilbert added microscope kits to his popular lines of Erector and Chemistry sets in 1934. Learn more...

Thursday, April 1, 2004

Serving Creativity

Tools extend the powers of the hand. Tools expand the world to be touched. The spoon was, at first, literally, a splint of wood improvised to collect for sipping the broth of boiled beast. Which came first: the soup (a word also derived from the sound of sipping) or the spoon? Learn more...

Thursday, April 10, 2003

Fastenation

Use buttons and laces to construct or adorn. or adorn and construct buttons and laces. Transform, transcribe, transfigure, transpose. Unbutton your imagination. Lace your work with wit, wisdom or wonder. Learn more...

Thursday, April 11, 2002

Leonardo's Cradle

Leonardo reveled in invention…the creations of the human hand that manipulate, manage, magnify and mirror nature. Nature usurped classical geometry as the ruler of Leonardo’s mind. And yet Leonardo connected invention to nature as simply and precisely as the concave of the tee embraces the curve of the sphere. Learn more...

Thursday, May 24, 2001

Turns of the Minds

Nature turns wheels with muscle, wind and water in dutiful simplicity. Leonardo's mind reconstructs that movement. He collects and contrives twists and turns to compose an infinite choreography: sometimes a dull march, sometimes a graceful waltz, sometimes a jazzy jitterbug. Learn More

Thursday, May 18, 2000

Checkers

Draughts are an ancient diversion. Pharaohs played. Like games evolved in China, India, Turkey and Africa. A book on checkers was printed when books were first printed in Leonardo’s epoch. Learn more...

Monday, November 1, 1999

Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden Reaches back to the 1939 World's Fair for it's 14th annual train exhibition. "Yesterday and Tomorrow" boasts scale replicas of some 60 buildings from the famous fair as well as four trains that visitors can control. There are also trains running overhead on a hanging display. Learn more...

Thursday, May 13, 1999

Arteries

Leonardo sees through surface. He sees the channels, conduits, and capillaries that structure and animate the flower, the insect, the city the body, the earth. Leonardo sees a universal web of connections. Learn more...

Wednesday, November 18, 1998

Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden reaches back to the 1939 World's Fair for it's 14th annual train exhibition. "Yesterday and Tomorrow" boasts scale replicas of some 60 buildings from the famous fair as well as four trains that visitors can control. Learn more...

Friday, May 1, 1998

Leonardo's Wellspring

The Mechanical spring was a metallurgic innovation newly mastered in Leonardo's Renaissance. Leonardo foresaw its influence in clocks , crossbows and flintlocks, in wind-up cars and robots. If a device could have two states at once compressed and spring or stretched and recoiled, is it not emblematic of the universal energy that Leonardo's eye uncovered? Learn more...

Sunday, February 8, 1998

Learning Power

1913 was the threshold of the electric age. A.C. Gilbert, age 29, had just conceived a steel construction set. His Erector Set's girders modeled the new trestles and skyscrapers. Almost as an afterthought, Gilbert added the parts to construct a small battery-powered motor. That began a line of experimental motors that would become the heart of the Erector Set. Learn more...

Thursday, May 1, 1997

Unmatched Leonardo

We asked artists to consider a box of wooden kitchen matches. These are at first the simplest and fullest expression of mass production convenience and uniformity. And yet they can ignite the imagination. These anonymous forms offer an infinitely variable armature for the creative mind. Learn More

Saturday, February 8, 1997

Gilbert and the Radio

In 1920, Guglielmo Marconi would broadcast opera on England's first commercial station. Within months, A.C. Gilbert would install a transmitter at his New Haven factory. He was the sixth American to hold a commercial license. His career in radio was brief and yet his radio tower became an enduring passion for technology. Learn more...

Saturday, February 8, 1997

Classical Blocks

Blocks from the Gilbert Company, from the Gilbert Era, from before and after Gilbert. Explore the evolution of materials, styles of connection, styles of instruction. Artifacts from the Museum's collection; the Collections of Steve Olin, Keith Rancourt and others. Learn more...

Friday, November 29, 1996

Flyer at 50

1946: The world began to rebuild itself after the devastation and destruction of the second World War. At an age when other men might have begun looking to retirement, A.C. Gilbert set out to add to his immensely popular line of pre-war learning toys. The result was a line of trains redesigned so completely that they bear only the name of the company he purchased in 1939: American Flyer. Learn more...

Thursday, May 16, 1996

Platonic Spools

Consider the spool and the cigar box. They are familiar and natural building blocks which give form to the first creations of children. They offer the experienced designer a universal geometry to explore. Learn More

Monday, January 1, 1996

The Leicester Codex

In the demonstration room, visitors were guided through re-creations of some of the observations and experiments that Leonardo himself either described or illustrated in the Codex Leicester. Designed in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History these demonstrations reveal Leonardo as a keen observer who was strikingly ahead of his time. Learn more...

Thursday, May 18, 1995

Leonardo's Clothespin

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks define the products and processes of design. Leonardo explores his world with the eyes of a Scientist; he reinvents it with the hands of an Artist. He directs students in architecture and landscape design, in fashion and theatrical design, in product design and graphic design: all of the creative expressions that surround humankind. Learn more...

Wednesday, February 8, 1995

Cast of Thousands

A. C. Gilbert sold toys to boys. The boys who received Kastor Kits were most likely 13 to 15 year olds. America had not yet accustomed itself to store-bought toys. Like Gilbert's Erector Set, which had promised to make a hundred toys, the Kastor Kit was a tool. Learn more...

Saturday, January 1, 1994

200 Years of Invention

On February 10th, 1994, The Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce will opened an exhibition of the innovations that marked The Chamber’s 200 year history. The Cotton Gin was among this nations first patents. New Patents are still filed each week. Patent connect invention to development and manufacturing. Learn more...

Sunday, October 10, 1993

Math Works

An exhibition of the experiences of the learning in work and play outside the classroom essential to mathematics learning in the classroom; an examination of the culture of mathematics learning. Learn more...

Tuesday, September 1, 1992

Leonardo & the Exploring Mind

On September 13th 1992, the Eli Whitney Museum opened Leonardo & the Exploring Mind, an exhibition of drawings and models created to put visitors in touch with Leonardo, Columbus, and the Age of Discovery. Learn more...

Thursday, June 18, 1992

Whistles

Lin Chapman collects whistles: some small, the size of your thumb, some that tower over a tall man. On June 18th, a display of his collection will open at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden. Mr. Chapman's fascination with whistles began a dozen years ago. He was completing a model of a steam engine. His wife asked "where's the whistle?" and the pursuit was begun. Learn more...

Sunday, September 22, 1991

A.C. Gilbert and the Tools of Learning

Alfred Carlton Gilbert shared his dreams with America's children. He built a world of learning tools. He encouraged active inquiry and adventurous discovery. The Hall of Science was both a place and an idea: give children the right tools, the children will educate themselves. The Eli Whitney Museum celebrates that vision and achievement. Learn more...

Sunday, September 23, 1990

Factory

Factory, an exhibition at the Eli Whitney Museum, will explore the Connecticut origins of the modern American factory. It will explore historic products of precision manufacturing: axes, guns, locks and clocks. It will showcase new technologies. In Factory, experience of the past will illuminate issues for the present. Learn more...

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