Fabricating authenticity: modeling a whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906-1974.

Historians of science have in recent years become increasingly attentive to the ways in which issues of process, matter, meaning, and value combine in the fabrication of scientific objects. This essay examines the techniques that went into the construction--and authentication--of one such scientific object: a model of a blue, or "sulfur-bottom," whale manufactured at the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. In producing their model, exhibitors at the American Museum employed a patchwork of overlapping discursive, procedural, and material techniques to argue that their fabrication was as authentic--as truthful, accurate, authoritative, and morally and aesthetically worthy of display--as an exhibit containing a real, preserved cetacean. Through an examination of the archival and published traces left by these exhibitors as they built their whale, I argue that the scientific meanings of authenticity at the American Museum were neither static nor timeless, but rather were subject to constant negotiation, examination, re-evaluation, and upkeep.