History of Science and Technology 

Ad*Access --  About 7,000 advertisements, mainly from U.S. publications, dating between 1911 and 1955. These are only a small subset of all advertisements printed during those years, so this site focuses on ads that relate to one of five main categories: Beauty and Hygiene, Transportation, Radio, Television, and World War II.

Boston and Its Neighborhoods -- Collections of historic photographs, prints, paintings, and more of Boston and related images.

"Built in America" -- The Library of Congress houses two large collections entitled "Historic American Buildings Survey" and "Historic American Engineering Record." The digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, data pages, and more show examples of architecture, engineering, and design in the U.S. and its territories, through a range of building types and engineering technologies.

Great Buildings Collection -- This site has images of "more than 1000 great buildings from around the world and across history."

Maryland Historical Society -- In addition to its 80,000+ photographs, the MDHS has online exhibitions.

Astronomiae Historia / History of Astronomy -- Here is the massive Table of Contents for this site. There is a great deal of information here, including astronomers' obituaries.

The Galileo Project -- This Rice University project is a source of information on the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).

Great Debates in Astronomy -- a NASA-sponsored site that includes information about debates with Curtis/Shapley, Paczynski/LAMB, Tammann/van den Bergh, and Peebles/turner

NASA Historical Archive -- NASA's archive of space history and manned missions, including information about the early astronauts, the patches worn for each mission, and much more.

NASA History Division -- The history of America's space program since NASA began in 1958, including human spaceflight, biographies, space science, policy, and much more.

10 Telescopes That Changed Our View of the Universe -- Historic telescopes through the ages, from Galileo to the 21st century.

Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation -- The Institute specializes in the history of botany and all aspects of plant science. It acquires and maintains collections of books, plant images, manuscripts, portraits, and data files, especially in the area of North American flora. The Institute also provides information in the areas of art history, botanical art and illustration, history of science, horticulture, botanic gardens and gardening, medicine, rare books, social and cultural commentary, and travel and scientific expeditions.

MendelWeb -- An educational site for classical genetics, introductory data analysis, elementary plant science, and the history and literature of science. The site is built around Gregor Mendel's 1865 paper "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" and a revised version of the English translation by C.T. Druery and William Bateson, "Experiments in Plant Hybridization." (Last revised 1997.)

New York Botanical Garden library and online catalog -- This library is one of the world's largest and most important botanical and horticultural research libraries, with over one million books, journals, original art and illustration, seed and nursery catalogs, architectural plans of glass houses, scientific reprints, and photographs.

Chemistry: The Chemical Heritage Foundation -- The CHF is a library, museum, and center for scholars in Philadelphia, PA. Its collections, include instruments, apparatus, rare books, fine art, and the personal papers of many scientists who worked in chemistry or molecular sciences. CHF also supports research and offers fellowships.

Royal Society of Chemistry history page -- Leads to biographies and other historical information.

Alan Turing Archives and Photographs -- A site listing Turing's publications and many sources of information, photographs, and other resources.

"Built in America" -- The Library of Congress houses two large collections entitled "Historic American Buildings Survey" and "Historic American Engineering Record." The digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, data pages, and more show examples of architecture, engineering, and design in the U.S. and its territories, through a range of building types and engineering technologies.

Computer History Museum -- This museum, located in Mountain View, CA, has online exhibits, an oral history program whose transcripts can be searched, and a catalog whose 20,000+ records can also be searched.

Historical Electronics Museum -- The history of America's defense electronics. Exhibits include communications, early radar, Cold War radar, modern radar, countermeasures, underseas, electro-optical, and space sensors.

A History of Imaging: revisiting the past to chart the future. Mait, Joseph N. Optics and Photonics News 17(2), February 2006, pp. 22-27. A comprehensive article about milestones during the history of imaging.

Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Archives -- The IET Archives has contents about the history of science, engineering and technology. It includes Research guides, biographies, articles, and online exhibitions, as well as information about the IET's history.

Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement -- Mostly materials from “the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day.”

MendelWeb -- An educational site for classical genetics, introductory data analysis, elementary plant science, and the history and literature of science. The site is built around Gregor Mendel's 1865 paper "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" and a revised version of the English translation by C.T. Druery and William Bateson, "Experiments in Plant Hybridization." (Last revised 1997.)

U.S. Board on Geographic Names -- Created in 1890, this body coordinates names for U.S., some foreign, and Antarctic entities, as well as undersea features.

Alexander Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone -- This is a series of flowcharts that include many sketches from Bell's experimental notebooks, patents, depositions in court, and correspondence. The charts are arranged in a hierarchy; the top level shows the major experiments along his path to a device that transmitted speech. Click on one of the sketches to move to a lower-level map, depicting another series of experiments, and so on.

Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe -- Epact is an electronic catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums:

• Museum of the History of Science, Oxford
• Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence
• British Museum, London
• Museum Boerhaave, Leiden

"All European instruments from these museums by makers who were active before 1600 have been entered in the catalogue. They include astrolabes, armillary spheres, sundials, quadrants, nocturnals, compendia, surveying tools, and more."

Silicon Valley Oral History Project -- "SiliconBase" is an online archive about the history, sociology, politics, economics, and culture of the region. The project's developers worked with researchers and area companies to identify materials and to preserve records for future researchers. The collections includes 2,000 documents, including text, images, videos, and sound recordings.

Worlds Woven by the Telegraph and Internet -- This is a National Library of Medicine exhibition whose "online resources" link gives many sources to the history of the telegraph and its inventors, and the history of the Internet. (Note that many of the links are dead.)

Dictionary of Scientific Biography -- Volume 15 of this series has "topical essays" in the history of mathematics. (From the pull-down menu, choose #15.)

Essay topics include:

• history of mathematical astronomy in India
• mathematics and astronomy in Mesopotamia
• mathematics of ancient Egypt
• Japanese scientific thought
• Maya numeration, computation and calendrical astronomy

The print volumes of this series are located in the Science Reference section on C-Level, Q141 .D5.

Mathematics Genealogy Project -- As the site states, their goal is "to compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world." The database can be searched, of course, and MathSciNet links to many of the names were added as of 2007.

Archimedes Project -- This Harvard site's aim is "to develop model interactive environments for scholarly research on the history of mechanics and engineering, from antiquity to the Renaissance." It is a joint project of Harvard's Department of the Classics and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Galileo Galilei's Notes on Motion -- This 300+-page manuscript contains Galileo's work on mechanical problems over a period of forty years. It contains short texts in Latin and Italian, extended drafts intended for publication, calculations, diagrams, and even some documents pertaining to experiments he performed. This is a joint project of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence; Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence; and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine

Institute of the History of Medicine, The Historical Collection and the JHU Department of the History of Medicine

Medical Library Association, History of the Health Sciences World Wide Web Links

Academy of Natural Sciences, Digital Collections from The Ewell Sale Stewart Library -- Digitized collections of "rare, beautiful, and important works on the natural sciences, books that most people will never see in their lifetimes. These books were published over the last five centuries, and document the discovery of plant and animal species by early explorers as they traveled the world."

Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online -- This University of Cambridge project is working toward making all of Darwin's works available online. There is a list of contents currently available.

Paper Dinosaurs, 1824-1969 -- An Exhibition of Original Publications from the Collections of the Linda Hall Library

Understanding Evolution -- This site is an educational site to explain what evolution is, how it works, how research in evolutionary biology is performed, and how ideas in this area have changed over time. (The site is a project of the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education.)

Center for History of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives -- The center has almost all books on physics and astronomy through most of the 20th century, including books (e.g., pre-WWII German-language textbooks) as well as papers and letters, oral histories, photographs, and artifacts. "Preserving the Heritage of Discovery" is an article (Physics Today, January 2002) with a wonderful description of the Center and its holdings.

The American Institute of Physics is in College Park, MD.

Atomic Heritage Foundation -- This foundation is a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age. In 2006, it merged with the Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association (MPHPA) [formerly "Children of the Manhattan Project."] According to the web site, the site is the largest web-based repository for primary source material about the Manhattan Project and its veterans.

Einstein Archives Online -- This collection contains the personal papers of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and supplementary material collected at the Albert Einstein Archives. It includes the manuscripts of Einstein’s scientific and non-scientific writings, correspondence with colleagues and contemporaries, personal documents, and family correspondence. The collection also includes materials such as photographs, sound recordings, and film footage. Materials are mostly in German and English.
The archives is a project of Hebrew University’s Albert Einstein Archives, the Jewish National and University Library, the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.

Richard Feynman was an amazing man as well as an amazing physicist. Feynman Online has much information about him, including the "Messenger Lectures" he gave at Cornell in 1964.

GRG Golden Oldies -- This site lists the citations of English translations of important old papers in general relativity. They are in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation. We own this journal from volume 1 to the present; the catalog record will tell you where each year is located.

Davies Project -- This Princeton-University-based project collects research into the history of university libraries in the United States, and the history of their collections.