Although Smithson’s papers and his vast mineral collection were all destroyed by fire in 1865, the story of his life and work has been largely recovered in the recent biography, The Lost World of ...

James Smithson by Hattie Elizabeth Burdette, 1872 NPG. In many ways it is James Smithson's science that … proved the crucial key to his story. Chemistry was the cutting-edge field of Smithson's ...

The Smithsonian Institution was established with funds from James Smithson (1765–1829), a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to found “at Washington, under the name of the ...

In 1823, James Smithson wrote a short article about a novel method he’d developed for making coffee. The article, first published in the Thomson's Annals of Philosophy, ...

Smithsonian Research Associate Heather Ewing talked about the life of English scientist James Smithson, the founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution. She described how Smithson's ...

The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: the Smithsonian By Nina Burleigh HarperCollins, 298 pages, $24.95 The Smithsonian ...

He was born in France and died in Italy. James Smithson had a vision to create the Smithsonian Museum in D. C. So what would he think today, 20 museums and galleries and of course the National Zoo ...

The world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Institution, was founded on this day in history, Aug. 10, 1846, after English scientist James Smithson made a generous gift.

James Smithson never set foot in America during his lifetime. It’s a mystery why the gentleman-scientist, who died in 1829, decided to leave $500,000 to a country he’d never visited.