Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute, named after the scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin, is a Science Center and Technology Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded on February 5, 1824 by Samuel Vaughn Merrick and William H. Keating and one of the oldest academic institutions in the United States.

History

Originally, the museum was housed in a building at 15 South 7th Street. In September 1884, the first Electrical Exhibition in the United States was carried out therein. Nikola Tesla held in 1893, his lectures on wireless power transmission. In 1934, the institution moved to its present location on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and in the same year demonstrated Philo Taylor Farnsworth at the Franklin Institute, the first purely electronic working television system.

Permanent exhibitions

In the museum, among others, the following permanent exhibitions are housed:

• Electricity and Technology, which in 2010 the exhibition Franklin ... He's Electric replaced, and shows work on the electrical and Benjamin Franklin.
• The Franklin Airshow includes collections of the Wright brothers with historic planes like the Model B Flyer, a Lockheed T-33 training aircraft for the U.S. Air Force from 1948, a Boeing 707 in its original size.
• The Joel N. Bloom Observatory has five telescopes, including a telescope from Zeiss with 24 cm aperture width. The observatory was renovated in 2006.
• The Train Factory is devoted to historic trains and locomotives such as the Baldwin 60,000.
• Space Command with the theme of space travel.

Awarding prizes

Since 1824, the Franklin Institute awarded various awards for outstanding technical and scientific achievements, with the names changed over the years. Major awards were from 1875, the Elliott Cresson Medal, the Howard N. Potts Medal, which was awarded in 1911, the Franklin Medal in 1915, the John Price Wetherill Medal from 1924 and the Louis E. Levy Medal for Authors of outstanding papers in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. Starting in 1968, the Albert A. Michelson Medal was awarded in physics.

As of 1998, all these different awards were consolidated under the name Benjamin Franklin Medal, which is awarded each year in several different disciplines such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics and biology, before 1998, also in materials science. Known historic award winners have included Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, and Thomas Alva Edison.

The latest prices of the Franklin Institute are the Bower Award for Business Leadership and endowed with $ 250,000 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. Both prices go back to the foundation of the chemical industrialist Henry Bower and awarded since 1990.