Filming History

The Oesper History of Chemistry Collections enabled a film crew to step back in time. The crew visited the 19th-century chemical laboratory to film for an upcoming History Channel documentary about attempts during the Civil War, by both the North and South, to develop unconventional warfare and espionage techniques, assassination plots against key political and military leaders, and campaigns of violence directed against civilian populations in order to either hasten an end to the war or to alter its outcome.

The footage shot in the laboratory represents the activities of the Confederate chemist Richard Sears McColluh, a former professor at Columbia University, who, after defecting to the South in 1863, attempted to develop poison gas weapons for the Confederacy.

The Oesper Collections allowed for a realistic depiction of a 19th-century lab. However, in one respect, some creative license was taken. The historical record indicates that McColluh tested his poison gas on cats, but in the lab scenes mice were substituted so as to avoid the possibility of a frantic and highly stressed cat leaping about the lab’s antiques. The mice were not harmed in the filming and were later returned to the pet store from which they had been purchased.

The Oesper Collections, a shared endeavor between the Department of Chemistry and the Chemistry-Biology Library, is one of only five sites in the United States having a complete 19th-century laboratory. The Oesper History of Chemistry Collections encompasses the Oesper Collection of Prints and Portraits, The Apparatus Museum, and the Harry Shipley Fry Papers (contained in the Archives and Rare Books Library), as well as the Collection of Books and Journals in the History of Chemistry, a research-level collection containing over 3200 journals and monographs dating from 1600 to 1920.

Source Index