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NIST Museum & Archives

Online Exhibits

Explore the exhibits by clicking on their titles below.

Science as Art Gallery Exhibition

Debuted October 2024

A Barred Experiment: The NBS designed prison bar tester

Debuted July 2024

LoTIS: A Lab to Market story

Debuted July 2024

Under Pressure: Wind Tunnel Studies for Structural Design

Debuted February 2024

Standardizing an Empire

Debuted October 2023

Lost in the Cornerstone: The 1916 NBS Time Capsule Re-Discovery

Debuted July 2024

The Cone Calorimeter: The Most Important Tool in Fire Safety Science

Debuted July 2024

Tuning into Weather Forecasting

Debuted January 2024

Defining the International System of Units

Debuted 2023

World's Smallest Soccer Field Exhibit: Nano Robots Take the Field exhibit title thumbnail

World's Smallest Soccer Stadium: Nano Robots Take the Field

Debuted 2023

Videodiscs and the Scanning Capacitance Microscope exhibit tile

Video Discs and the Scanning Capacitance Microscope: A failed consumer product solves a semiconductor metrology challenge

Debuted 2023

Luminous Script Signs: The Origin of the 'Neon Sign' Title Banner

Luminous Script Signs: The Origins of the 'Neon Sign'

Debuted 2022

The Forgotten Radium Scientists

Debuted 2022

NIST's 120th Anniversary: Celebrating 13 Decades of NIST History

A Special NIST Museum Exhibit

Debuted 2021

Hero Image for The Pandemic Poet and Other Tales exhibit

The Pandemic Poet and Other Tales: From a NIST 'Genealogy' Project

Debuted 2021

Landmarks in the History of Natural Catastrophe Modeling: An exhibit from Johns Hopkins University and the NIST Museum

Debuted 2020

Is the Fare Fair? exhibit Hero image for exhibit link. Black and White image of 1921 Checker taxi in Washington, D.C. with the exhibit title 'Is the Fare Fair? Taximeter Testing in the 1920s and Today' in yellow at the top of the image.

Credit: Sarah Reeves/NIST

Is the Fare Fair? Taximeter Testing in the 1920s and Today

Debuted 2017

Beautiful Measures: From the NIST Museum Collection

Debuted 2017

NIST's Material Science and Engineering Division (MSED) Centennial

Debuted 2014

Below are links to the NIST Virtual Museum legacy exhibits that have been archived on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine.

This small collection provides a glimpse of the over 1,400 items in the NIST Museum Collection. Click on the image information to learn more about each item.

Meter Bar 27	Luminous Script Signs
Guarded Field Ionization Chamber	Magnetic Trap
Quartz Oscillator	Radiosonde
Committee Kilogram	Uranyl Nitrate Crystals
Proving Ring	Topografiner