Albert S. (Albert Smith) Bickmore

Born in Maine in 1839, Albert Smith Bickmore studied at Dartmouth and then worked with the great naturalist Louis Agassiz at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. His early career was shaped by fieldwork and travel, including expeditions in Southeast Asia that fed both his scientific interests and his writing.

Bickmore is most closely remembered as the originator and one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He spent years promoting the idea, helping build support for the museum, and later became especially influential in public education there, creating programs that brought natural history to teachers and students in a lively, accessible way.

He also wrote books drawn from travel, natural history, and museum work, combining observation with a strong desire to make science engaging for general readers. He died in 1914, but his larger legacy lives on in the museum world and in the idea that scientific collections should be opened up to the broad public, not kept only for specialists.