You can’t take it with you
After the Ruthven Museums building officially closed its doors to the public last year, Michigan Today explored its deserted halls, cupboards, and cabinets to find a trove of fascinating and forgotten artifacts. A renovated Ruthven will be home to classrooms, labs, and offices for the University’s central administration staff. Ruthven’s former occupants now live in the new Biological Sciences Building.
Doug Ensor - Ph.D. ‘82
The “voltmeter” is instead a power supply, I believe from what I can see, it was made by Heathkit. It is called a High Voltage Supply because it provides higher plate voltages used in vacuum tubes in radios and instrumentation before the transistor era, as well as the voltages needed to light them up (filament supply).
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holdship
Thanks for the explanation! I just love how it looks.
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Robert LaJeunesse - MSE EE 1976
Now I know where my Property Disposition sale Heathkit IP-2717 power supply came from. Wondering if it was used for some electrophoresis experiments many years ago, when it actually worked. And yes, I brought it back to usability.
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holdship
This is why I love Michigan Today.
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Trena Brannon
“LOVE” comment!
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Carl Freire - '90 M.A.
“Fish (Division) serials” are, alas, “serial” publications (meaning magazines and journals) that had been subscribed to by, presumably, the Fish Division. Boringly, there are no “As the Aquarium Turns” or “All My Fingerlings” tales to be found here . . . at least not in the conventional sense. An ichthyologist might have a different perspective.
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Elizabeth Rodriguiz
Picture 7: “It’s Another Language!” Those are amino acids and their genetic codes.
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Karen Davis
Surely by now codon usage tables are no mystery to any college student, although normally expressed for mRNA (with Uracil replacing Thymine); since the genus is given as “M.” my guess is that these data are from studies of genus Mus (mice), and indeed may date as far back as the mid-1960s.
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Dan Erickson
I’m glad someone went to shoot some photos, but it would have been much more productive, and interesting to have been escorted with someone more familiar with the building (not to mention museums and science). Some of the cooler things you missed were the old steel bank-style vault door in the basement, with its combination lock, or the attic with its old wooden catwalks, or the “Georama” that was hidden between two walls (something the demolition crew will be surprised to find), and the multiple sub-basements where the fish were stored, etc.
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