Nowa­days, most muse­ums are large pub­lic insti­tu­tions cre­at­ed for the pur­pose of edu­cat­ing peo­ple about spe­cif­ic areas of inter­est such as art, sci­ence, and nat­ur­al his­to­ry.  Experts run these muse­ums. They are well orga­nized. And their infor­ma­tion is accurate.

But in [P.T.] Bar­num’s day there were no large pub­lic muse­ums. Instead muse­ums were owned by indi­vid­u­als who set up their own dis­plays, then charged the pub­lic an admis­sion price. The first per­son in Amer­i­ca to do this was Charles Will­son Peale, painter, inven­tor, and nature enthu­si­ast. Peale found­ed a muse­um in Philadel­phia in 1784 with the pur­pose of “bring­ing togeth­er objects that might be help­ful in advanc­ing knowl­edge.” He tried hard to cre­ate schol­ar­ly exhibits. Nat­ur­al his­to­ry dis­plays such as stuffed birds and rep­tiles skele­tons were arranged accord­ing to sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples, and some spec­i­mens were even placed in repli­cas of their nat­ur­al habi­tats. “Can the imag­i­na­tion con­ceive any­thing more inter­est­ing than such a muse­um?” Peale asked. Oth­er would-be muse­um own­ers soon began imi­tat­ing Peale. By the begin­ning of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, almost every major city had such an establishment.

But these muse­ums soon faced stiff com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er forms of amuse­ment. Small cir­cus­es, tour­ing artists, and the­aters began grab­bing the pub­lic’s inter­est. Peo­ple stopped com­ing to the muse­ums, with their qui­et, nev­er-chang­ing, edu­ca­tion­al exhibits. Muse­ums tried to evolve with the times. Even Peale added “curiosi­ties,” such as a two-head­ed calf and a chip from Queen Vic­to­ria of Eng­land’s chair. But it was­n’t enough to recap­ture the pub­lic’s atten­tion. By 1840. most of the coun­try’s muse­ums were going bankrupt.

That’s when Bar­num stepped in. Fun came first, and the show­man looked for dis­plays that appealed to pop­u­lar tastes, adding them to his col­lec­tion in a hodge­podge: giant balls of string next to fos­sils; ancient coins next to a clear cir­cus. Some arti­facts were fake, oth­ers were labeled incor­rect­ly, and none includ­ed any infor­ma­tion about their his­tor­i­cal or cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance. Lat­er, to com­pete with the­aters and trav­el­ing artists, he added live per­form­ers, a zoo, and even an aquar­i­um. Amer­i­cans had nev­er seen any­thing like it. Wrote the his­to­ri­an A.H.Saxon, “Bar­num changed the mean­ing of the word muse­um in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Now it had become the name for any build­ing that con­tained a vari­ety of exhibits and entertainments.”

From The Great And Only Bar­num by Can­dace Flem­ing, pages 32–33.