CITIZEN SCIENCE AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Since its founding, the Smithsonian has 

always been dependent upon the kindness 

of strangers to carry out its scientific 

research mission. Today, a recent 

resurgence of such efforts is known as 

“Citizen Science.” The Cornell University 

Lab of Ornithology, for example, 

established a citizen science bird 

observation data collection program in 

1966, with live data input since 1997, and 

in 2011 has over 200,000 observers 

participating. In the 21st century, online 

efforts like the Encyclopedia of Life, where 

specialists worldwide contribute to a 

database on all life forms, and the Smithsonian Flickr Commons, where the public identifies 

events, people, etc., in Smithsonian photographs, continue a tradition of engaging the public in 

the increase of knowledge, as well as its diffusion. Given the Smithsonian’s unique mission and 

the esteem in which it is held by the general public, the Institution has always been able to call 

upon a broad spectrum of private individuals to assist in our scientific endeavors. 

Shortly after becoming the first Secretary of the Smithsonian in 1846, Joseph Henry established 

the Meteorological Project, a basic research project to study the weather and patterns of 

storms across the continent. To compile the data he needed, in 1847 Henry recruited 150 

volunteer weather observers across the country. Observers included military personnel 

stationed at distant forts, farmers, teachers, doctors, and even telegraph operators. Henry 

prepared a “Circular” that provided detailed instructions about what observations were to be 

recorded and how, with blank forms for submission. The Smithsonian often provided the 

necessary scientific instruments, including thermometers and barometers that would provide 

standardized readings. The volunteers submitted monthly reports that included several 

observations per day of temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind and cloud 

conditions, and precipitation amounts. They also were asked to comment on "casual 

phenomena," such as thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, meteors, and 

auroras. 

A decade later, the project had more than 600 volunteer observers, including people in Canada, 

Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Its cost in 1860 was $4,400, or thirty percent of the 

Smithsonian's research and publication budget. A second aspect of Henry's meteorological 

project was weather telegraphy. Early on, Henry foresaw the storm-warning potential of the 

telegraph, an invention he had helped pioneer in the 1830s. Realizing that storms in the United 

States generally moved from west to east, he sought to develop an early warning system for 

Operation Moonwatch: Philippine Boy Scouts, 1958

Smithsonian Institution Archives
the Midwest and East Coast. By 1849, Henry worked out an arrangement with a number of 

telegraph companies to allow free transmission of local weather data to the Smithsonian. By 

1857, telegraph stations from New Orleans to New York were cooperating. These dispatches 

enabled Henry to create a large daily weather map located in the Great Hall of the Castle. Its 

purpose, Henry wrote, was "to show at one view the meteorological condition of the 

atmosphere over the whole country." 

The Civil War dealt a major blow to the meteorological project. Urgent public business forced 

weather information off the telegraph lines, and secession cut Henry off from his southern 

observers. Although he was able to revive the project after the war, Henry began taking steps 

to transfer its operations to the federal government. In his annual report for 1865, Henry 

called for the federal government to establish a national weather service capable of issuing 

storm warnings and other weather predictions. In 1870, Congress passed a bill that put storm 

and weather predictions in the hands of the U.S. Army's Signal Service. By 1874, Henry 

convinced the Signal Service to take over the volunteer observer system as well. The weather 

functions of the Signal Service were transferred in 1891 to the newly established U.S. Weather 

Bureau, which later became the National Weather Service. That service today, as David Laskin 

puts it in his 1996 book, Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, "still 

adheres to the same fundamental structure and principles that Joseph Henry devised and set in 

motion.” It is important to note, that in all other countries, weather information was 

considered of military strategic importance and was not made available for the public and 

researchers to use. Henry established the principle that all this scientific data would be freely 

available in a democracy. Great Britain just made its data available to the public in the last 

decade. 

When Spencer Fullerton Baird was hired as the first Smithsonian 

Curator in 1850, he began an ambitious collecting effort across 

the country and later the globe, building on Henry’s volunteer 

network. Baird distributed natural history “Circulars” 

requesting information on local flora, fauna, geology, and 

ethnology. Baird’s collectors sent specimens and artifacts to the 

new National Museum, with detailed provenance information, 

following Baird’s detailed instructions for collecting, preparing 

and documenting specimens. Baird’s father-in-law was 

Inspector General of the U.S. Army, and General Churchill 

encouraged soldiers to collect for the museum and facilitated 

transportation of collections back to Washington. Baird’s 

military collectors included such luminaries as General George 

McClellan, Admiral David Farragut, and Commodore Matthew 

Perry. Baird expanded Henry’s network significantly, to include hunters and trappers in remote 

locations, professors in the new colleges and universities, members of local scientific 

academies, and settlers moving west. Indeed, Baird was so successful that he soon wrote that 

he felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who could not stop or even slow the flow of materials into 

Spencer Fullerton Baird

photographed by William Bell

Smithsonian Institution Archives
the Institution. But Baird reveled in these relationships, maintaining a personal 

correspondence with hundreds of volunteers – during some of these years, Baird wrote over 

6,000 letters per year (over sixteen letters per day) in addition to all his other duties. 

In the late 1880s, after Baird’s death, a movement to professionalize science emerged and new 

barriers were erected to participation in science by amateurs across the U.S. The Smithsonian 

greatly reduced its role of “correspondents,” much to their dismay and focused on 

collaboration with other scientific professionals. But amateurs did not disappear entirely, and 

young naturalists such as Teddy Roosevelt continued to write to the Smithsonian for advice and 

donate their specimens to the National Museum. Indeed, as he left the White House in 1909, 

Roosevelt headed off to British East Africa to collect thousands of specimens for the new 

museum building (now NMNH), funded during his presidency. His collection of lions, elephants, 

giraffes, hippos and rhinos entranced visitors to the new National Museum building. 

During World War II, the National Museum organized another major citizen science effort. 

Early in the war, the Smithsonian focused on sharing its detailed knowledge of remote regions 

of the Pacific, but as the conflict continued, curators saw an unparalleled collecting 

opportunity. 

The Institution prepared A Field Collector’s 

Guide to Natural History and distributed 

millions of copies to U.S. soldiers. 

Continuing Baird’s tradition, the Guide

provided detailed instructions on how to 

collect artifacts and specimens, preserve 

and prepare them for shipping, and 

document what the soldiers had collected. 

Secretary Alexander Wetmore, among 

others, maintained a steady 

correspondence with the young recruits, 

listening with great sympathy to their tales 

of the horrors of battles, and encouraging 

them to relax in their spare time by observing and collecting the natural world around them. I 

recently located one of Wetmore’s correspondents, Sammy Ray of Mississippi, who visited the 

Smithsonian this April to see the letters he had written and specimens, especially birds that he 

had collected. Ray had just graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in biology, 

when he joined the U.S. Navy. He wrote to Secretary Wetmore about the birds he collected on 

Pacific islands to send to the Museum, noting that he would only collect for the museum “when 

time and duty permit.” 

During the heat of battle at Palau, he reflected “never has my interest in birds been as little as it 

was here” and “I thought that I had made my last bird skin.” He soon returned to his bird 

watching and told Wetmore that his natural history interests were a welcome diversion from 

the stresses of battle. After the war, he continued his natural history studies to become a 

professor of marine biology at Texas A&M University, and at 91 years old is still an active 

Theodore Roosevelt on Smithsonian-Roosevelt African 

Expedition, 1909, Smithsonian Institution Archives
scientist and teacher. At the end of World War II, the Smithsonian’s National Museum held the 

premier collection of Pacific natural history specimens and ethnological artifacts, and remains a 

powerhouse of Pacific science today, due to the ongoing efforts of citizen scientists. 

Astronomy has always had a strong tradition of amateur involvement, engaging a broad 

spectrum of the public in compiling astronomical observations. After the Smithsonian 

Astrophysical Observatory was created in 1890, its staff encouraged public involvement in the 

study of the heavens. After World War II, however, these efforts became far more systematic. 

The nation was shocked when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October of 1957, before 

the U.S. SAO director Fred Whipple was one of the few astronomers who believed the Soviets 

were capable of this, and SAO was the only organization in the U.S. prepared for the launch. 

Whipple had established a ring of Baker-Nunn cameras across the globe to photograph the 

satellite as it circumnavigated the earth. He also created “Operation Moonwatch,” a 

volunteer/amateur effort to compile observations of the satellite, observations that would be 

used to more accurately determine the shape of the earth. Students in Cambridge, 

Massachusetts, Boy Scouts in the Philippines, and amateurs in South America used standard 

equipment and followed a Moonwatch manual to compile standardized observations. As space 

exploration began, Moonwatch volunteers even tracked the Apollo missions. Until its 

termination in 1975, the Moonwatch Division coordinated this network of volunteers and 

amassed a total of nearly 400,000 observations of satellites. The Volunteer Flight Officer 

Network was established in 1963 by Denver Moonwatch team leader Herbert E. Roth to collect 

eyewitness reports of satellites and meteor sightings from airline pilots and other flight 

personnel. Before its termination in 1975, the Moonwatch VFON had grown to include the 

employees of 118 airlines in 57 countries and had collected approximately 4200 observations.

Many of these traditions have been reinvigorated with online information sharing in the 21st

century. Continuing Joseph Henry’s work, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Center 

for Tropical Forest Studies today maintains a global database of climate observations, crucial for 

the study of climate change and its impact on biodiversity, http://www.ctfs.si.edu/. 

The Encyclopedia of Life project, of which the Smithsonian is a founding partner, draws on the 

expertise of amateurs and professionals to compile a comprehensive database documenting all 

life on earth, http://www.eol.org/, a project that carries on Spencer Baird’s dream of a 

comprehensive inventory. At Smithsonian Archives, a collection of portraits of little-known 

scientists in the Science Service collection was placed online in the Smithsonian Flickr 

Commons. The public responded immediately with biographies of local scientists, mentors, 

college professors, and family members, providing important supplementary data about these 

researchers. At the National Zoo’s Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Peter David Marra 

created the Neighborhood Nestwatch program, which encourages citizen scientists to help 

collect data on the survival and productivity of birds found in Washington, D.C. area backyards, 

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/scbi/migratorybirds/research/neighborhood_nestwatch/. 

The first two Secretaries, Joseph Henry and Spencer Fullerton Baird, knew that the Institution’s 

resources were limited and they would have to rely on the enthusiasm and dedication of 

volunteers/amateurs to achieve their goals. They cultivated these relationships through 
correspondence and free publications, knowing their value to the Institution. Both also 

believed that the Institution’s mandate for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among 

men” in a democracy should include a broad spectrum of the public in the increase, as well as 

the diffusion, of knowledge. Since 1847, volunteers have consistently contributed to the 

Institution’s research initiatives, providing untold hours of labor to help the Smithsonian carry 

out its mandate.

 

 Joseph Henry Circular to Meteorological Observers, 1872, Smithsonian Institution Archives