As chief of the National Park Service's Historic American Engineering Record, Eric DeLony chronicles artifacts of technology past, including bridges, dams, textile machinery, windmills - even NASA's neutral-buoyancy simulators and rocket test stands. Since the cultural resource's launch in 1969, HAER (www.cr.nps.gov/habshaer/haer) has documented 8,000 such constructions and inventions. Its vast collection of photographs, drawings, and reports will be shown in a 30th anniversary exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, later this year.
"The industrial environment needs to be recognized," says DeLony, "because it's the record of our technological achievements."
And what of the milestones of the digital era? "We've often talked about the computer age and electronics manufacturing, but we've done nothing with it yet," DeLony says. "I'm still struggling to capture everything from the 19th century."
