Internal Revenue Bureau chemical laboratory, testing whiskies (Treasury lantern slide, about 1915)
A hand-coloured Treasury lantern slide captioned "Internal Revenue Bureau, Chemical Laboratory, Testing Whiskies": a man beside a long rack of glass distilling apparatus and labelled whiskey bottles. The catalog serves this slide's scan under a neighbouring record.
- Date
- 1915/1917
- Kind
- photograph
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- NAID
- 158884157
- Rights
- A hand-coloured lantern slide in the General Records of the Department of the Treasury (Record Group 56), series "Photographs of Treasury Department Personnel, Facilities and Activities" (NAID 516576), whose slides, the catalog says, were prepared for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 or the Mississippi Centennial of 1917. The item and the series both read "Use Restriction: Unrestricted." A United States government work, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The stored copy is an 1,800-pixel downsample of the catalog's scan.
The National Archives catalog title is “Internal Revenue Bureau- Chemical Laboratory, Testing Whiskies,” local identifier 56-AT-60a. The slide’s printed caption reads “INTERNAL REVENUE BUREAU, CHEMICAL LABORATORY, TESTING WHISKIES.” It shows a laboratory bench with rows of glass flasks, condensers and tubing above a line of labelled whiskey bottles, and a bald man in a white shirt and vest standing at the right. The man is not named.
The digital objects of this record and of NAID 158884159 are crossed in the catalog. The file attached to this record (56-AT-060.jpg) is the slide captioned “Secret Service Division, William J. Flynn, Chief of Division, and Staff,” and the file attached to NAID 158884159 (56-AT-060A.jpg) is this whiskey-testing slide. The image stored here is the one whose printed caption matches this record’s title; it was downloaded from the NAID 158884159 record.
The catalog gives no date for the slide. The series description says the slides were made for the 1915 or 1917 exhibitions, which is the basis for the date span on this page. If the series date holds, the slide predates national Prohibition. The caption does not say what the whiskies were tested for.
