Peale's Philadelphia Museum

In 1802, Peale expanded the museum into the State House (now Independence Hall), where it stayed until his death in 1827. Throughout the museum’s heyday, Peale made his business successful through innovation in advertising, sales, membership, and appeals to public curiosity.

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The museum’s attractions included Peale’s menagerie of live animals (including two live grizzly bears he later shot and mounted in the museum), souvenir silhouettes, and “the great incognitum” (mastodon).

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Peale’s museum combined science and spectacle. Peale hoped his museum would introduce Americans to the wonders of the natural world. As a  “world in miniature,” it served both to educate and entertain.

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The Peales perfected techniques for collecting, preserving, and displaying their specimens. Birds--the most numerous of the collections--were skinned, cleaned, and stuffed with cotton. The Peales developed the technique of mounting them in small habitat dioramas.

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Thousands came to the museum to see Peale’s mastodon. The attraction was on par with other world wonders featured in travel books like this. Other pages show the Sphinx, Niagara Falls, and Pompeii.

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In 1802, John Isaac Hawkins gave Peale his physiognotrace invention--a device for tracing profiles in miniature. Peale entrusted its operation to his slave, Moses Williams, who became particularly skilled at cutting intricate, accurate likenesses. 

Williams’s silhouettes became popular souvenirs for museum visitors. As many as 8,000 visitors bought them at 8 cents apiece each year. Once freed, Williams married the family’s white cook and used his profits to buy a two-story house.

APS. Peale-Sellers Family Collection.

In May 1796, the American Philosophical Society launched a contest for the improvement of fireplaces. Peale and his sons submitted five models, won the competition (they ran unopposed), and were granted a U.S. patent for their designs.

The models built on previous designs by Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Thompson, and David Rittenhouse, who had experimented with safe and efficient heating technologies. Peale installed “smoke-eaters”-- fuel-efficient, smoke-free, and decorative fireplaces--in his Philadelphia Museum.

Inspired by his friend, Thomas Jefferson, Peale retired as a gentleman farmer to his country estate, Belfield. Here Peale describes the property and the house, now part of the La Salle University campus in historic Germantown, PA.

APS. Peale-Sellers Family Collection.

Baron von Drais invented the bicycle’s precursor---the draisiana---a “fast walking machine” propelled by foot. Upon hearing about the invention, Peale made his own to coast around Belfield and surrounding Germantown. Soon after, the city forbade “fast walking.”

APS. Peale-Sellers Family Collection.

By 1819, the collections included some 800 “Indian costumes and artifacts.” Some were from contemporary Indigenous people. Others were from the ancient past. Franklin Peale, with his interest in mechanics, collected tools, many from the Delaware Water Gap and some from prominent collectors.

His wife, Caroline, was also a collector. She posthumously published his collections catalogue and donated the objects to the Society.

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Titian Ramsay Peale II combined his father’s love of art, science, and technology in his work as a naturalist. As a collector, Titian designed two-sided, protective, storage boxes for his butterfly and moth collections. As a scientific illustrator, he used new technologies such as the camera lucida, and later, photography, to accurately depict the natural world.

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The U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), headed by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, was launched by the federal government to explore unfamiliar corners of the globe and establish a far-reaching American presence.

Titian Ramsay Peale II and a team of nine scientists accompanied the other 346 men on six ships. They collected, sketched, and gathered information on over 60,000 plant and animal specimens.

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