WASHINGTON, D.C.: Looking through garbage can be rewarding. Inspecting an opponent’s rubbish has been invaluable for political campaigns. In affluent areas you can furnish a house with what people leave out on the street. And there’s always the chance that you’ll stumble on a cache of important historical documents.

That’s what happened in 1984 when the Delaware & Hudson (D&H) Railway was sold. The D&H has a distinguished history stretching back to 1823, when it was incorporated as a canal company. It ran America’s first steam locomotive (not counting a few experimental prototypes) in 1829, when Horatio Allen tested the British-built Stourbridge Lion as a means of hauling coal to the D&H Canal’s western end. (It turned out to be too heavy.) By the early 1980s the D&H had fallen on hard times, and, unable to compete with Conrail for freight service, it was reduced to panhandling for government grants, with ever-diminishing success.

The D&H was saved when a Connecticut company merged it and several other lines into a new Northeastern rail network. In the process of changing ownership, the company’s offices were cleaned out, and many boxes of miscellaneous stuff were set to be discarded. A local collector got wind of this and quickly secured permission to search through the jetsam. What he found was a heap of invaluable drawings and other documents from the D&H’s repair and fabrication shops during the golden age of steam railroading. The collector snapped them up, and after passing through various sets of hands, the documents were acquired late last year by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH).

The treasure trove contains some twenty-six thousand ink-on-vellum shop drawings dating from 1900 to the demise of steam in the early 1950s. (Nineteenth-century drawings seem unfortunately to have escaped salvage, but there are files and records from as far back as the early 1870s.)

Similar collections of documents exist for other railroads, but none so complete. Bill Withuhn, curator of transportation at the NMAH, calls the D&H documents “the most comprehensive set of railroad drawings we know of that is not extensively culled” (though he admits that the plans for “some of the sexier locomotives” are gone).

In the steam era, railroad shop hands prided themselves on being able to make absolutely anything. The D&H drawings include plans for such mundane items as shovels, wheelbarrows, office supplies, dinnerware, and stoves for cabooses. Some of the drawings may have been made for use by outside contractors, but Withuhn believes that the railroad’s shops did build such things themselves when they had the time. “The everyday economic activity of the railroad is illustrated in these drawings,” he says.

The drawings contain enough detail to keep a trainload of historians and rail fans occupied for years. There is a wealth of minutiae on passenger-car construction, down to specifications for types of wood to be used and even brands of varnish. One of Withuhn’s favorites is a design for a simple tin cup made of bent sheet metal, like the project millions of high school students have made in shop class. By far the most detailed part of the drawing is the base of the cup, where the D&H logo to be embossed is specified with loving precision.

The NMAH has no firm plans yet on how to handle the collection. After it is put in some sort of order, it will be made available to scholars; there may be a preliminary public exhibition in a year or two. Whatever becomes of the drawings, everyone involved appreciates the irony of fussing so much over something that was going to be put out with the trash. It’s all too common these days to see people turning history into junk; turning junk into history is considerably rarer and more valuable.

AKRON, OHIO: Lynn Samuels, a New York City radio personality, raised a good point recently. “What is it with the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame?” she asked. “It doesn’t even exist, and they keep puttina people in it!”

The same might be said for the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF), which is planned for Akron, not far from the rock ’n’ roll hall’s projected home in Cleveland. Despite its lack of a building, the NIHF has matched its upstate neighbor’s enthusiasm for theoretical enshrinement, inducting technoloav’s eauivalent of the Beatles and Rolling Stones (Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers) as well as lesser stars like Ernest Volwiler, co-discoverer of sodium pentothal, who might be more comparable to, say, the Strawberry Alarm Clock.

The NIHF was founded in 1973, and since then it has had growing pains as difficult as those of many of the inventions it celebrates. At first the organization was run out of the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, where a modest hall-of-fame display is still temporarily housed. The governing foundation didn’t settle on a permanent site until 1987, after Edwin W. Oldham, an Akron lawyer, noted the number of Ohio inventors in the shrine (there are now eight, including the three in the previous paragraph) and got local civic leaders behind an effort to settle it in the Rubber City. Late last year, after several years of planning, the design of Inventure Place, as the hall’s future building is now known (that’s invention plus adventure ), was completed and approved.

Having been conceived and designed, the NIHF must now be marketed. Fund-raising continues apace, or as apace as possible in today’s economy. When will Inventure Place actually open? “We’re not even talking about that right now,” says Thomas B. HoIlingsworth, communications director for the National Invention Center (NIC), which oversees the Hall of Fame project and related activities.

Before they could decide on a design for the building, backers of the project had to decide what exactly they wanted it to be. A traditional assemblage of objects in glass cases with explanatory signs was clearly out; it would hardly be fitting to celebrate the spirit of innovation with a museum straight out of the nineteenth century. Instead the NIC set out to concentrate not so much on the inventors themselves or their inventions as on the process of inventing.

At one planning session a group of advisers (including Frederick Alien, the editor of this magazine) went through index cards and pushpins and felt-tip markers by the hundred as they feverishly compiled a list of significant inventions of the last two centuries. The result was encyclopedic, covering everything from the Franklin stove and the cotton gin to Post-It notes and the pull-tab beverage can. Armed with such raw input, museumdesign consultants and architects distilled everything into a form they hope will help visitors learn about inventing and encourage them to develop their own inventive talents as well.

The resulting plans go a step beyond the “interactive” exhibits that are now popular, Hollingsworth says, to achieve “transactive” design. For example, if the subject is aviation, a visitor might use a CAD/CAM computer to modify the design of an airplane and see what effect shortening the wings or moving the cockpit would have on its aerodynamics. Also planned is a “make it” area, in which people can invent things and see their designs made manifest. The idea is not only to impress visitors with the wonders of technology but to get them personally involved in inventing. Other topics to be stressed are women and minority inventors and the ways that inventions interact with society.

In addition to the Hall of Fame, the NIC sponsors a variety of activities aimed at promoting inventiveness among Americans: forums, workshops, contests, television programs, and even a Camp Invention for youngsters. And since “inventive people like to party, too,” as an official publication puts it, there are formal galas and informal get-togethers for people interested in the field. (For information, write to the NIC at 146 South High Street, Suite 206, Akron, OH 44308.)

Among the stated aims of these proj ects are to “rekindle American interesi in science education” and to “make i difference in American global com petitiveness.” That’s a tall order, bul the NIHF recognizes the importance of history in achieving it. The museum will celebrate the inventors of yesterday and today in the hope of inspiring the inventors of tomorrow.

BETHESDA, MD.: As our article on Charlotte Smith (page 22) suggests, women inventors are becoming a popular topic for historians. Anne L. MacDonald’s Feminine Ingenuity (Ballantine, $22.50) is the most complete book yet on the subject, full of information on Smith and a host of other women who invented such things as the machine that makes paper bags and the first effective street sweeper. MacDonald has combed through the women’s patent applications (some poignantly artless, some self-assured), newspapers, feminist journals, archives, and government records. The result is a chronicle of women’s struggle to show, first of all, that they can invent; second, that they always have; and third, that their inventions do not all have to concern housewares and clothing.

MacDonald notes that at late-nineteenth-century fairs and expositions there was often a “Woman’s Pavilion” at which the products of feminine ingenuity were displayed. After the turn of the century the idea of separating women inventors from men fell out of favor. In their day, though, the pavilions served an important purpose, as places where women interested in promoting equality could meet and exchange ideas. Perhaps one day an inventor’s gender will truly no longer be noteworthy. If so, books like MacDonald’s will also have been instrumental in showing that everyone’s creativity deserves to be nurtured.