National Air & Space Museum

History

The National Air Museum was created as a separate bureau of the Smithsonian Institution by an Act of Congress on 12 August 1946. Twenty years later, its name was changed to the National Air and Space Museum as part of a congressional act authorizing a separate building to house its collections, which opened to the public on July 1, 1976. The National Air and Space Museum collection dates back to the closing of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia when the Smithsonian received a group of kites from the Chinese Imperial Commission. In 1889, the Stringfellow engine became the first object accessioned into the collection. The collections of the Museum were housed in the Arts and Industries Building, in a shed in the south yard known as the