CAMBRIDGE — “Moving” is a lexical two-fer. As a verb, it pertains to location, as in getting from one place to another. As a modifier, it pertains to emotion, as in having feelings affected. With “Moving Objects,” which runs at the MIT Museum through April, both meanings apply.
The 50 or so items in the show are drawn from the 1.5 million (that’s not a typo) in the museum’s permanent collection. Over the course of five years, 140 truckloads got moved when the museum transferred its holdings from several sites to a new storage facility, in Medford. The items in the show were chosen because in one way or another the movers found themselves affected by them. They were amusing or beautiful or unexpected or otherwise unusual.
For example, the move included 50 tons of architectural and maritime drawings. In 1867, MIT established the first architecture program in the United States; and in 1912 the Pratt School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering was founded there. The show includes several architectural drawings, including one for a “moonbase” (what could be more MIT?) and 14 half-hull models of yachts and other vessels, part of the institute’s collection of 1,500 ship models.
A few of the works in the show have well-known names associated with them. When Alexander Graham Bell made that first telephone call, it consisted of the words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” “Moving Objects” includes a painting by Thomas A. Watson — yes, that Watson.
There’s a marvelous Berenice Abbott photograph, “Swinging Wrench” (also known as “Spinning Wrench”), from her late-’50s stint at MIT creating photographs to illustrate principles of physics. There are four examples of Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s stroboscopic images. Next to the Edgertons is a Kodatron speedlamp, from 1943. Edgerton was one of the researchers who contributed to its development.
Nearby is an even more impressive machine, a Van de Graaff accelerator. If you’ve ever seen a mad-scientist movie, chances are you’ve seen its larger sibling, a Van de Graaff generator. The original Van de Graaff generator, and a mighty piece of machinery it is, is on display at the Museum of Science. The machines’ inventor, Robert Van de Graaff, was an MIT physics professor. Less distant in time, and even more striking in appearance, is Spring Turkey, a bipedal robot built between 1994 and ‘96.
To give a sense of the move as process as well as outcome there are 11 large-scale color photographs of members of the moving team going about their business. Even better are several display cases presenting various everyday items the team used: packing labels, a tape measure, Sharpies, a Bostitch staple gun, utility knives. Not only is this a nice nod to the workers and the work they did. The installation looks terrific, the objects being as handsome as they are useful.
“Moving Objects” is adjacent to a larger exhibition, also drawn from the museum’s holdings, “MIT Collects.” An explanatory wall text includes a quotation from MIT’s Sherry Turkle: “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.” That observation would seem to apply to “Moving Objects” no less than to “MIT Collects.”
The highly eclectic contents change regularly. Among those currently on display are a model of a Saturn C-1 rocket; half a dozen airfoils, from the 1930s (visually, they’re distant kin to the half-hull models in “Moving Objects”); a model of Sputnik; a block of limestone removed from the institute’s Great Dome when it was renovated; the innards of a Minivac 6010 computer, from 1962. A display devoted to the pioneering MIT computer scientist Claude Shannon — have you used Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, named in honor of him? — includes a W.C. Fields juggling robot created by Shannon. That’s right, a W.C. Fields juggling robot. Magnetic fields aren’t the only kind of fields found at MIT.
MOVING OBJECTS
At MIT Museum, 314 Main St., Cambridge, through April. 617-253-5927, mitmuseum.mit.edu
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.