Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Smithsonian Institution is named after British scientist James Smithson, who was born in 1765 and died in 1829. He left his estate to the United States to fund an establishment in Washington dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, a mandate that passed to the US government when his nephew Henry James Hungerford died childless in 1835.
The Smithsonian Institution was officially founded on the 10th of August, 1846, when President James K. Polk signed the legislation establishing it as a trust instrumentality of the United States. Congress had accepted James Smithson's bequest on the 1st of July, 1836, but eight years of debate over how to spend the money followed before the institution was formally created.
The Smithsonian operates 21 museums in total. Nineteen museums and galleries, along with the National Zoological Park, make up the core Smithsonian institutions. Eleven are located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with others elsewhere in the city, two in New York City, and one in Chantilly, Virginia.
The Smithsonian's collections total more than 155 million artworks, artifacts, and specimens, the largest such holdings of any museum complex in the world. The National Museum of Natural History alone accounts for more than 148 million of these, with its invertebrate zoology collection containing over 49.8 million specimens. Fewer than one percent of the total collections are on public display at any given time.
Almost all Smithsonian facilities admit visitors without charge. The one exception is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, which charges an admission fee. The institution draws around 30 million visitors each year.
On the 29th of April, 2022, the Smithsonian adopted an ethical returns policy that places moral arguments above legal ones when evaluating acquisitions. Under this policy, the institution returned Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in an October 2022 ceremony. In February 2024, a task force also recommended working toward returning all human remains held by the institution, which include the remains of more than 30,000 individuals largely acquired in the 19th and early 20th centuries.