The Museum is the proud keeper of a German type IXC submarine the U-505 which was built for Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine. Durning WW II she was captured by the USNavy Task Group 22.3 on June 4 1944. She was the first warship captured by U.S. forces since the War of 1812. All but one of U-505's crew were rescued by the Navy and then the submarine was towed to Bermuda in secret and her crew was restrained at a US prisoner-of-war camp. The Navy classified the capture as top secret to prevent its discovery by the Germans. Her codebooks, Enigma machine and other secret material help the Allied cryptologists to succeed in breaking the German code and "turned the tide" in the Allies' favor. She was kept outside for many years, but in 2004 she had 35 thousand pounds of rust scraped off and with the use of heavy equipment she was lifted up and transferred in her new home, inside the museum!
We watched one of the Museum's most beloved experiences: a baby chick pip out of its shell and take its first step into the world, the Museum's first baby chick was hatched in 1954 and thru the years the Hatchery has helped preserve rare chicken breeds! We saw frogs with glowing eyes, some mutated fruit flies and cloned mice. I was fascinated with the mice and really wanted to get some pictures of them, but they were asleep in their little houses.
On May 26, 1960, the original Pioneer Zephyr train was donated to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, this was the first diesel-powered streamlined stainless-steel passenger train.....In the early 1930s, the US was in the depths of the Great Depression and with no money, freight trains were not hauling as much as used too, people could no longer travel as much as used to nor could they buy as much goods. Automobile travel had increasingly cut into rail ridership, making faster, more efficient service imperative for railroads to compete. Railroads needed a way to re-energize the traveling public and offer a bit of hope for the days to come. The first Zephyr was completed by the Budd Company on April 9, 1934, powered by an eight-cylinder, 600hp, model Winton engine.
To catch the public's attention, on May 26 1943, this train was not simply rolled out of the factory; it made a dash from one end of the train tracks in Denver, to the other end, in Chicago. The railroad spared no expense in planning this operations, all the other trains along the Zephyr's route were diverted on the day of the dash and every road crossing was manned by a flagman to stop automobile traffic ahead of the train to make sure that all the crossing were kept clear. Zephyr made the trip in 13 hours 5 minutes with an average speed of 77 mph! On the second anniversary of the train's famous dash, the original Zephyr was rechristened the Pioneer Zephyr to distinguish it as the first of the Zephyr fleet.
The Museum also has the Apollo 8 space capsule. In 1968, this spacecraft was the first Apollo mission to take humans to the Moon and back. An important prelude to actually landing on the Moon was testing the flight trajectory and operations for getting us there and back. Apollo 8 did this and acheived many other firsts including the first manned mission launched on the Saturn V, first manned launch from NASA's new Moonport, first pictures taken by humans of the Earth from deep space, she set a new world speed record: 24,200 mph and achieved the first live TV coverage of the lunar surface. Totally awesome!
You can also descend into a coal mine, touring Old Ben No. 17, this is a real mine relocated from southern Illinois. You ride in a cage elevator down into the mine. You can board a work train to experience a coal miner's "daily commute" and see working examples of how extraction machinery has evolved from the pickaxe to longwall machines that can carve out football field-sized sections of shale....
From sailing ships to space travel this Museum has it and you can experience it all! Then we rode the South Shore Line back to South Bend airport, walking up to the car I noticed that someone had stolen the tire cover off the jeep.. I guess they liked my design on it! What a fantastic day we had!
