In 1972, John William Christopher Draper and James Christopher Draper wrote to the Smithsonian Institution informing us of the recent death of Dorothy Draper, in Yonkers, New York. A few weeks later, my colleague George Norton and I, together with the Draper brothers and their families, spent a long day in a large house owned by an elderly woman who had been loath to throw anything away. What we found ranged from the trivial to the terrific (from pieces of stale wedding cake and chains of annual dog-tags, to early daguerreotypes). The Drapers were very generous, and allowed us to put everything we deemed of historical interest into the Smithsonian van. When we returned to Washington and examined the collection, we found that we had a great deal of important material pertammg to the early development of photography and spectroscopy, and that some of this provided information that was not otherwise found in the historical record. 1© 2000 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
