engineering

Higgins Armory Museum

Higgins Armory Museum is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Higgins Armory Museum rather than just read about it. In short: The Higgins Armory Museum is a collection in the Worcester Art Museum. It was formerly a separate museum located in the nearby Higgins Armory Building in Worcester, Massachusetts, dedicated to the display of arms and armor.

Key takeaways

Higgins Armory Museum belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Higgins Armory Museum to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Higgins Armory Museum from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Higgins Armory Museum is a collection in the Worcester Art Museum. It was formerly a separate museum located in the nearby Higgins Armory Building in Worcester, Massachusetts, dedicated to the display of arms and armor. It was "the only museum in the country devoted solely to arms and armor" and had the second largest arms and armor collection in the country from its founding in 1931 until 2004, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The collection consists of 2,000 objects, including 24 full suits of armor. The museum closed at the end of 2013 due to a lack of funding. Its collection and endowment were transferred and integrated into the Worcester Art Museum, with the collection on show in its own gallery. The former museum building was sold in December 2014 and now serves as a local events venue.

History John Woodman Higgins was a prominent industrialist in Worcester, Massachusetts who owned the Worcester Pressed Steel Company. He traveled to Europe multiple times throughout the 1920s where he collected arms, armor, and other steel items. One of his most important purchases was eight full suits of armor from the collection of George Jay Gould in 1927. Originally, he stored these items in his house, which quickly filled with anything that he could find made of steel, from suits of armor to automatic shoe polishers. Higgins incorporated his collection as a museum in 1928; the collection grew larger than his house could hold, so he began construction on a steel and glass museum building next to his factory in 1929. "The Museum of Steel and Glass" opened on January 12, 1931 with a grand gala. Music was played by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Higgins' sons dressed in suits of armor. In its original layout, the museum displayed a wide variety of objects constructed of steel including "medieval weaponry, automobile parts, and even ... an all-steel airplane suspended from its ceiling." Admission to the museum began with a walk through the armor exhibits and ended with a tour through the production lines to see modern steel manufacturing. The production floor was accessed through catwalks connecting the factory and the armory. Higgins invited visitors to the museum across these catwalks, and he also invited his workers to visit the museum on breaks to get inspired. Higgins died in 1961, leaving the museum a US$17,000 endowment.

Collection in Worcester Art Museum The collection today is spread throughout the museum by time period, uniting period armor with artworks depicting armor, such as paintings and sculpture. Each first Saturday of the month demonstrations of armor in various fighting styles from the collection are given, to enable visitors to better place the artifacts in historic context. The museum continues the collection's educational programs on medieval history and arms and armor, ranging from school workshops and teacher education to scholarly lectures. The Olive Higgins Prouty Research Library, founded in 1997 with an initial collection of "several thousand books on arms and armor" also remains in the collection. The Higgins Armory was a major center of study for Western martial arts. Scholars associated with the museum such as curator Jeffrey Forgeng, William Short, and Ken Mondschein produced monographs and translations, gave papers and sponsored sessions at scholarly conferences, and lectured and demonstrated both in the US and Europe. The Higgins Armory Sword Guild was a study group founded in part by Patri J. Pugliese that conducted research into Western martial arts and demonstrated at the museum and in the community. The former museum also held historical fencing and martial arts classes. The collection consists of 2,000 objects, making it the second largest arms and armor collection in the country behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The collection includes 24 full suits of armor, a gladiator helmet, and "Helmutt," a dog mannequin dressed in reproduction boarhound armor. The oldest object in the collection is an Eastern Mediterranean dagger from between 3000 and 1500 B.C. The collection includes gladiator and Corinthian helmets, gauntlets from the Renaissance period, and the helmet of a 19th-century French cuirassier. There are also pieces that depict the courtly life: helmets for jousting tournaments, a crossbow for hunting, a ceremonial gorget, and an anvil that was used to manufacture such pieces. There are knives and axes from Africa, bow case covers from ancient Islam, a horned kulah khud (helmet) from India, and samurai armor from Japan, among others. The collection also includes examples of armor for dogs and horses. There are also full-scale models of jousts and foot tourneys.

In popular media Norman Rockwell drew an imagined scene in the Higgins armory museum entitled Midnight Snack for the November 3, 1962 cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Higgins Armory Museum has been featured on the History Channel on multiple occasions, including a special DVD extra that focused solely on the museum. In April 2011, the TV show Ghost Hunters filmed an episode at the museum to see if the ghost of Mr. Higgins haunted the building.

References

External links

Classical fencing and historical swordsmanship classes at the Higgins Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) No. MA-1236, "Higgins Armory, 100 Barber Avenue, Worcester, Worcester County, MA", 16 photos, 3 color transparencies, 1 data page, 2 photo caption pages

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Higgins Armory Museum

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Higgins Armory Museum claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Higgins Armory Museum before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Higgins Armory Museum ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Higgins Armory Museum

In research: Higgins Armory Museum appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Higgins Armory Museum in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Higgins Armory Museum is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Armour collections, Buildings and structures completed in 1930, Defunct museums in Massachusetts, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Higgins Armory Museum outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Higgins Armory Museum in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Higgins Armory Museum means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
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Frequently asked questions

What is Higgins Armory Museum in simple terms?

Why does Higgins Armory Museum matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Higgins Armory Museum?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Higgins Armory Museum.