Contact: William Jensen, (513) 556-9308 or at william.b.jensen@uc.edu
October 26, 2005 - On September 20 a film crew from Engel Entertainment visited the University of Cincinnati campus to shoot scenes in The Oesper History of Chemistry Collections for an upcoming two-hour special for the History Channel.
The documentary, which is in the early stages of production, has the working title An Uncivil War and will deal with attempts during the final years of the American 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 crew spent the day shooting scenes in the 19th-century chemical laboratory located in the Oesper Collections in the History of Chemistry. The footage was intended to represent 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.
Dr. William B. Jensen, curator of the Oesper Collections, recalled that "it got a bit dicey at times as it was necessary to fit lighting equipment, an actor, a director, a camera man, a sound technician, and myself into a relatively small room packed with hundreds of irreplaceable glass antiques.But in the end we came through without accidentally breaking anything."
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 where scenes of this sort could be filmed (the others are located in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and at various historical sites relating to the career of Thomas Edison).
"We mapped out a series of shots ahead of time showing what a chemist would probably be doing if he was working on the sorts of things McColluh is thought to have done," Jensen noted. "The film crew followed our suggestions to the letter and so we were able to avoid such Hollywood cliches as modern-day pyrex beakers and flasks filed with colored water and bubbling dry ice."
"However, in one respect we did have to exercise a little artistic license", Jensen continued, "The historical record indicates that McColluh tested his poison gas on cats, but in the lab scenes we substituted mice instead as the last thing I wanted was a frantic and highly stressed out cat leaping about our antiques. Needless to say, the mice were not actually harmed in the filming and were later returned to the pet store from which we had purchased them."
The film crew estimates that the documentary will be finished and ready for airing sometime in the spring of 2006.
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.
For more information on The Oesper History of Chemistry Collections, contact William Jensen at (513) 556-9308 or by e-mail at william.b.jensen@uc.edu.
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