Smithsonian Facts

A stray puppy was smuggled onto a troopship in a coal bin in 1917. He served 18 months in the WWI trenches, warned his regiment of mustard gas attacks, located wounded men in No Man's Land, and bit a German spy's leg until soldiers arrived. He is the most decorated war dog of WWI and the only dog promoted to sergeant through combat. His body is at the Smithsonian.

Fred Rogers wore a hand-knitted cardigan in nearly every episode of his show. His mother, Nancy, knitted every single one by hand - each in a different color. She made him a new sweater every Christmas until she died in 1981. Rogers donated his cherry-red cardigan to the Smithsonian in 1984. It is still there.

Bob Ross painted roughly 30,000 works in his lifetime - nearly triple Picasso's output. For each of his 381 TV episodes, he painted three versions of the same scene: one before the camera, one on air, and one for his books. Today, 1,165 of those originals sit in cardboard boxes in a Virginia warehouse owned by Bob Ross Inc., which has never sold a single one. The Smithsonian holds four.

NASA built a full-scale twin of the James Webb Space Telescope. They called it the Pathfinder. Engineers froze it to -400 degrees F inside NASA's biggest cryogenic chamber to prove the mirror-support structure would hold its exact shape in deep space's cold. The real Webb launched in 2021. The Pathfinder just went on permanent display at the Smithsonian. It's the closest thing on Earth to the real Webb.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum opened without scissors. On July 1, 1976, NASA beamed a signal from the Viking 1 spacecraft, already orbiting Mars but not yet landed. The signal crossed nearly 200 million miles of space and cut the ribbon instead. Fifty years later to the day, it reopened with 5 new galleries after an 8-year rebuild.