PolyThinkers Pad

Ever thought of your out dated computer as a work of art? Perhaps you’ll change your perspective after seeing Mark Richard’s remarkable photographs of old school computers.

Richard’s book, Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers, reveals modern technology’s evolution by combining computer history with a series of striking photographs of the world’s most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Pictured above is Apple 1, a far cry from MacBook Air, it’s the first computer built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs back in 1976.

You probably thought robots were a relatively modern invention. According to some sources, they have been around as long as one of the early enablers of the Industrial Revolution,  the steam engine. Read about the world’s first robot, Steam Man, created in 1865, and other “Mechanical Marvels of the Nineteenth Century.” Be sure not to miss the profile of the most illustrious of these Victorian era robots, the legendary boilerplate, who “served with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and fought alongside Pancho Villa.”

In Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Professor Myles Jackson delves into a time when scientists were committed to understanding the world of music. In the nineteenth century, physicists, musical instrument makers, and performers tried to understand the nature of musical genius, the underlying physics of acoustics, and the instruments themselves. Musical instruments provided physicists with experimental systems, and physicists’ research led directly to improvements in manufacturing instruments.

Myles Jackson is a History of Science and Technology Professor at Poly whose research interests include molecular biology and intellectual property in Europe and the US, genetic privacy issues, and the history of 18th and 19th-century German physics. His first book, Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics is also available in the Dibner Library.

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]

Has the recent presentation by Dr. Jill Jonnes roused your curiosity about the author’s work? In addition to Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, mentioned in a prior post, the library owns:

South Bronx Rising: The rise, fall, and resurrection of an American city

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World

Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs

These and many other fascinating accounts related to the subject of American history and culture are available at the Dibner Library.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is making 150 years of American scientific history available by publishing its entire collection of Biographical Memoirs on the Internet. Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased NAS members written by those who knew them or their work.

Since 1877, NAS has published over 1,400 memoirs. Among the memoirs published online are those of famed naturalist Louis Agassiz; Thomas Edison; Alexander Graham Bell; noted anthropologist Margaret Mead; and psychologist and philosopher John Dewey. More memoirs will be published regularly until the entire collection is available online. PDF files of each memoir are available online at www.nasonline.org/memoirs.