Stories from the Vaults

Tom takes us back to the origins of the Smithsonian's collections. He explores Teddy Roosevelt's hunting trophies, John Steinbeck's sea urchins and Phyllis Diller's joke file. Add this to the roughly 50,000 items donated annually, and you get a sense of the immense number of artifacts the Smithsonian holds in its museums.

Tom is on a mission: to discover what it means to be the best, the tiniest, the coldest and the most misunderstood. He explores the art of taxidermy at the National Museum of Natural History, the music of a 300-year-old Stradivarius at the National Museum of American History and unique technology that scrunches the Bible onto one tiny microchip.

Tom tries to unravel the idea of "Home Sweet Home." He visits the National Air and Space Museum's collection of space suits, learns about Native American tipis at the National Museum of the American Indian and finds an astonishing array of life in a thimble of sand.

Tom explores the many faces of beauty through the eyes of scientists. Three Smithsonian curators offer their surprising perspectives on the elusive meaning of true beauty as it applies to their work with advertising, orchids and ants. Beauty isn't just in the eye of the beholder.

Enter the vaults of the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum in search of earth-shattering firsts. From a new collection of vintage planes to the very first videogame (hint: it wasn't Pong), Tom discovers what it takes to claim the title of Number One.

The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Natural History and the National Postal Museum all hold clues to the afterlife. Deep inside the vaults, the evidence for life after death has never been more convincing.

Tom dives into the very heart of the world's largest museum complex, amidst more than 136 million objects. With such an incredible variety of things to see, any single artifact could seem out of place, but there's nothing haphazard about the systematic collections at the Smithsonian. Tom visits the National Zoo and the National Museum of American History, showing us that breadth certainly doesn't equal randomness.