The Franklin Institute is bringing the Baldwin back into spotlight along with 600 other historical treasures

For decades, the Franklin Institute has largely focused on mounting splashy traveling shows tied to movies, Legos, or preserved cadavers, or on refurbishing exhibitions on sports or space.

But soon the Institute will turn the spotlight on its own trove of historic artifacts.

Philadelphia’s science center owns about 40,000 historically significant items — a bent stick of iron that once topped a Benjamin Franklin lightning rod, model wings the Wright brothers tinkered with before finding just the right shape for flight, and lesser-known ephemera, documents, and artifacts of science, industry, and technology.

Many of these objects have been on display before, but some not in decades, and now the Franklin is putting the finishing touches on a space entirely dedicated to them.

It’s not the usual antiseptic storage facility of stacks and archival boxes. The Hamilton Collections Gallery is an open, two-story space where the public is invited to rub elbows with history. The room creates a public platform for these objects on a scale unprecedented in the Franklin’s history, leaders say.

The $12 million space opens the Saturday before Thanksgiving with a first exhibition celebrating the Franklin Institute’s 200th anniversary.

On one side of the room sits the most impressive artifact of them all: the Institute’s Baldwin 60000 locomotive, in residence since 1933. The big black engine has managed a neat trick in the newly configured space designed by the D.C. cultural studio of architectural firm SmithGroup. It’s in the spot it occupied before the renovation, yet it now looks precariously perched. Just about a foot away from the railroad ties beneath the tracks on which the locomotive sits, the floor has been cut away to make visible for the first time a lower-level 1930s steel and concrete structure holding up 350 tons of locomotive.

In an echo of its structural cousin, the beefy steel structure has been painted Ben Franklin Bridge blue, a sly nod to the namesake the venerable bridge and museum share.

The Baldwin occupies an emotional place, too — the same one perhaps as the giant suspended blue whale at New York’s Museum of Natural History, forever fixed in the memory of many as a giddy first encounter with something truly ginormous.

“This is right up there with the [the Franklin’s] giant heart as far as an iconic thing that we have in our building,” Abby Bysshe, the institute’s chief experience and strategy officer, said of the locomotive “Being able to create a new space around it and bring everything else around — it’s a really fun space for a science center.”

As part of the gallery’s debut, the Baldwin locomotive is undergoing conservation — dust and grease removal and paint “consolidation,” which is ensuring that all the paint stays together and adheres to the surface. “It’s a very meticulous process,” said director of collections and curator Susannah Carroll.

What the train won’t do is what it used to do so thrillingly — move just a few feet on its track for its riders. Too much wear and tear, said Franklin Institute president and CEO Larry Dubinski.

Underneath the train, visitors can look down to that lower level, where archivists go about their work. Glass cases filled with historic items stretch from the lower to upper level, where another wall of glass cases will house yet more artifacts.

About 600 items will be visible in the new storage cases.

“I think there’s definitely a combination of old favorites as well as new items that people have never seen,” said Carroll.

“200 Stories for 200 Years” will be on view for at least two years, and the Franklin plans to rotate in other exhibits on various themes every couple of years, a spokesperson said. The Institute worked with a consulting committee from other organizations to help form questions to guide what items would go in the inaugural show.

“They helped us hone some ideas, some key themes, like, ‘Is the artifact indicative of a transformative scientific moment or technology? Is it relatable from a human perspective?’ So bicycles make an appearance in the collection because they’re very relatable and they have great technological innovation over time. Personal stories, transformative society, or science stories as well have been kind of key themes for the artifacts.”

Some items were chosen simply for their aesthetic appeal.

“We selected a mystery clock, which is very attractive,” said Carroll.

Among other pieces in the show:

Vacuum tubes made by Lee de Forest, whose inventions made possible the electronic age; items invented by Oliver Evans, the Philadelphia-based inventor who developed pioneering steam pump technology; three Princess telephones (blue, yellow, and pink); a model of John Fitch’s Delaware River steamboat, 1787; an Atari 810 floppy disk drive; and an engraving machine, typewriter, printing press, pacemaker, telescope, air pump, chronometer, and the like.

The new collections gallery and six new core exhibitions around the science center are part of a multiyear master plan supported by an as-yet-unannounced multi-million-dollar campaign. At the same time the collections gallery opens, the institute’s renovated giant heart will be unveiled in the “Body Odyssey” exhibit.

“The goal here for us as we move through this building and upgrade our experiences is that we’re bringing experience to an equal level of what those traveling exhibits promise from an entertainment and engagement perspective,” said Bysshe.

Another goal is to make science more relatable. The new Hamilton Collections Gallery will feature video interviews with people like an electrician who, as a high schooler, attended a Franklin Institute program for Science Leadership Academy students, and was drawn to Franklin’s lightning rod.

“Those kinds of moments are what we’re hoping something like this inspires,” said Bysshe. “So instead of just having stuff in glass cases, we’re really creating that personal connection and asking people to think about what these things mean to their everyday lives.”