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The face on the one-dollar bill is not the real George Washington. So say experts who are re-creating what our first president really looked like in 3-dimensions. As this ScienCentral News video explains, they are not only bringing him to life, but also restoring his youth.
Early in school Americans learn all about the young man who chopped down a cherry tree and then confessed the deed to his father. That young man went on to be the nation's first president and is often remembered for his wooden dentures.
Most Americans think of George Washington as the stiff old man who appears on every one-dollar bill. But U.S. historians say the one-dollar bill isn't worth much when it comes to portraying their first president. Jim Rees, executive director of historic Mount Vernon points out that George Washington and the artist who painted him didn't much like each other.
"You might say that portrait might be an example of an artist's revenge," Rees says. "We've been working for years at Mt. Vernon to try to give people a feeling of what this man was really like, and it's gotten tougher and tougher and tougher… So we're building a huge new education center at Mount Vernon, and the goal of it is to show what Washington was really like. And we decided that the first question that we had to answer was, 'What did this guy really look like?'"
So Rees commissioned a group of scientists and artists to recreate Washington at age 57, then age-regress him back to 45, and 19. Forensic anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz, the head of the team, says he now knows a lot more about Washington than he learned in school.
But there was one problem: reconstructions are usually created using a person's bones, but no one was going to give him permission to dig up Washington. So, Schwartz, a professor in the departments of anthropology and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, had little to work with: a full-length marble statue and a bust of Washington at age 53 that was believed to have been based on actual measurements, some 2-dimensional portraits, some clothing, and his dentures.
"I didn't have access to his bones, or to many of the things that were actually part of his personal, daily life when he was alive," he says.
"I needed to figure out what his bones were like in his 50s, so I could figure out how much bone and tooth to put back to make him 45 and then 19," he explains.
One problem was that although the famous face of Washington might be legitimate, the body and hands of the full-length statue might well have been created from the artist's stand-ins. However, because the team was able to scan Washington's clothing, which was in the form-fitting style of the time period, it allowed them to get a good approximation of his body's shape and dimensions. So, the new reconstructions have Washington's characteristically tall body and thin limbs.
Washington at 19 image: StudioEIS, courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
Schwartz used Washington's dentures to determine the curvature of his jaws, but he discovered early on that contrary to popular belief Washington did not wear wooden dentures. They were in fact made of ivory, as was common at the time, but were so stained from eating, smoking and drinking that cracks may have appeared as the grain of wood. Wearing them for the portrait on the dollar gave Washington that stern expression.
"It was only later on, when he had full sets of dentures, that he had to keep them in with his mouth because they had springs on them," says Schwartz.
Once Washington had been digitally rejuvenated to his younger self, a team at StudioEIS stitched together the images of each head and body and created the three molds of the heads from which wax reproductions were made. The wax Washingtons were painted to look extremely lifelike — down to the pale skin with ruddy cheeks and grayish-blue eyes — and each face was given a unique expression. The younger men were finished off with reddish wigs.
So the three Washington models each provide a different, vivid snapshot of a phase in Washington's life — the 45-year-old Washington had a more relaxed face, and the 19-year-old had all his own teeth. Schwartz himself is amazed by the results.
"Having lived with these images in my head for such a long time… seeing them actually come out to be life-like is just… I can't believe it, actually, it's wonderful," says Schwartz.
The cost of the project — one million dollars. The value of getting to know the father of our country — Rees says, priceless.
The statues will become a part of a sixty-million dollar display at Washington's historic home in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
Schwartz's work was reported on in the February, 2006 issue of Scientific American, and the reconstruction work was funded by Mount Vernon.