1961-1962 - American Museum of Natural History

NINETY-THIRD ANNUAL REPORT
OF THE PRESIDENT
To the Trustees of
The American Museum of Natural History
and to the
Municipal Authorities of the City of New York
In the American Museum of Natural History the distance
between the Roosevelt Memorial Hall and the Corner Gallery
is barely the length of a city block. Yet in the few minutes that
it takes for a Museum visitor to walk from one hall to the other,
he spans nearly five billion years. The exhibit "Man in Space"
in Roosevelt Memorial shows how scientists are preparing to explore
new worlds in the future. The Corner Gallery exhibit,
"Dating the Past with Atoms," shows how they reconstruct the
history of the earth.
These two special exhibits, opened during the past year, illustrate
both the vast range of time spanned by the Museum
and the rapid pace of progress in certain branches of science.
They provide an effective supplement to the permanent halls in
which the Museum tells the continuing story of the world in
which we live.
Filling the entire Roosevelt rotunda, the first of these exhibits,
"Man in Space," was opened to the public on Columbus Day,
October 12, 1961, by Mr. James E. Webb, administrator of the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and
to date we estimate that approximately 2,000,000 people have
visited this exhibit. An educational grant of $110,000 for the
exhibit, made by the Martin Marietta Corporation, as well as
generous co-sponsorship by the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation
and Newsweek, is most gratifying evidence of the support
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