Collections Highlights - Searchable Database
Information about select items in CHF’s collections is available online in a searchable database. Use the browse and search links to the right to view these highlights from our collections. We are adding to this database all the time, so please check back regularly for new additions.

Collections Overview

Fine Art
The renowned Eddleman and Fisher Collections present a fascinating view of alchemy and the alchemists in over 90 paintings and 200 works on paper from the 17th through the 19th century. Other highlights of CHF’s collection include portraits of chemistry’s forefathers, including Joseph Priestley and Robert Boyle; the World Brain, a conceptual artwork that gives an illusion of dimensionality; and The Alchemist, by N. C. Wyeth.

Instruments and Artifacts
Our collection features hundreds of 20th-century chemical instruments including a 1940s Beckman pH meter, a 1920s Duboscq colorimeter, and nearly 130 instruments donated by PerkinElmer. Artifacts range from awards, scrapbooks, and some of the first preproduction nylon stockings to early batteries, glassware, and apparatus.

Photographs
Our image archive contains thousands of photographs of notable chemists, laboratories, historic gatherings and symposia, chemical instruments, artifacts, and other interesting subjects, including the Williams Haynes Portrait Collection of nearly 1,000 portraits taken in the early 1900s.

Personal Papers and Organizational Records
CHF holds the personal papers of such innovators as Paul Flory, Carl Marvel, and Donald Othmer, and the unpublished records of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Chemists’ Club, and several other organizations.

Contact
For more information about our collections, please contact archivist@chemheritage.org.