page_title: Christian William Miller
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Christian William Miller / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: [Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article] by William H. Miller Jr 3
context_page_description: Christian William Miller was an American artist and model who contemporaries qualified as "one of the most beautiful men" in the gay social scene of New York City in the 1940s.
context_section_description: From 1939 to 1941, while still a student at the School of Professional Arts, Miller worked as a designer for Datzenbach & Warren, Brunschwig & Fils, and the oldest luxury department store in the United States, Lord & Taylor. He designed fabrics, wallpaper, stage sets for summer theatres as well as freelance advertising and arranging window displays.
  Miller enlisted in June 1942 in the United States Coast Guard and trained with the USS Berkshire County (LST-288). He was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, serving until 1946. While following the SKAT Insect Repellent project (a malaria control project) in 1942 in Perth, Western Australia, Miller was assigned to a research project with Richard Delano, a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, promoted by the Air-Sea Agency, to design a pocket-sized balloon-like water desalination device to be used by Navy and Army fliers, named Sunstill. Franklin D. Roosevelt displayed a model of Sunstill on his desk and Winston Churchill had one with him in his briefcase. The first Model A was in production in the summer of 1943.
  While enlisted, Miller worked in a plastic laboratory, where he developed several plastic products:
  a lightweight plastic hat-sunshade developed for the Quartermaster Corps (United States Army)
  a kayak-type plastic inflated boat, weighing only a few pounds and folding into a small suitcase
  an inflatable plastic chair, both comfortable and sturdy, which collapsed to the size of a briefcase, designed for travellers; it is now in the permanent collection at the Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art. In 1944 The Times defined it "a chair whose fish-net seat (draped over a pneumatic, plastic doughnut) was surrealistically adapted to the most unsurrealistic sitter".
  All these objects were exhibited at MoMA from May 24 to October 22, 1944 for its 15th-anniversary show, "Art in Progress". The chair was again exhibited at the MoMa from May 6, 2009 to January 10, 2011, in the show "What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 1944–56".
  Also a photographer, Miller documented his travels around the world and social life.
caption: Bill Miller and George Gallowhur with Sunstill
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