Published: Pisa, 1964 MIT’s rare book collections contain many treasures. One of our prized possessions is the 1638 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, Intorno à Due Nuove Scienze, or Discourses on the Two New Sciences. This is the last book published by Galileo during his lifetime, and a landmark of scientific literature. Another of Galileo’s groundbreaking works is his Sidereus Nuncius, often referred to in English as The Starry Messenger. The Libraries’ copy of this title isn’t a genuine first edition of Galileo’s 1610 publication; rather, it’s a beautifully produced, numbered, limited-edition facsimile, printed in Pisa in 1964. In the Sidereus […]

Published: New York, 1963 Welding of metals is a process crucial to technology and industry, but certain metals defy conventional welding. Explosive welding was developed as a solution to this problem, allowing such welded pairings as titanium with steel, and copper with steel. The research partnership of Rinehart and Pearson was among the first to develop this now widely-applied technology. Rinehart and Pearson met while both were working at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California. As they state in the preface to Explosive Working of Metals, each author wrote the section of the book with which he […]

Published: Chicago, 1962 The Oxford Companion to Philosophy calls The Structure of Scientific Revolutions “the most influential book in modern philosophy of science.” Published originally in 1962 as part of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the book was apparently begun while Kuhn was still a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned the Ph.D. in physics in 1949. The work has had a profound impact on the study of philosophy, economics, sociology, and of course history of science. Indeed it’s difficult in a context such as this brief, book-a-year survey of the MIT Libraries’ holdings, to do justice to […]

Published: Washington, 1961 The list of important speeches delivered in America in the 20th century is lengthy. Much shorter by far is the list of noteworthy quotes from such speeches – excerpts that have cut through the clutter of a noisy epoch to become almost universally familiar: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Ask […]

Published: Cambridge, Mass., 1960 Could you direct a pedestrian from Post Office Square in downtown Boston to Myrtle Street on Beacon Hill? How about from Mass General Hospital to South Station? And could you describe what that pedestrian would see once they got there? As one part of his 1954-1959 “Perceptual Form of the City” study, Kevin Lynch sent researchers out into the streets of Boston to ask people to do just that. That study laid the groundwork for The Image of the City, Lynch’s seminal 1960 work on the urban environment. Kevin Lynch studied at Yale University, Rennselaer Polytechnic […]

Published Cambridge, Mass., 1959 From 1950 to 1951, an allied team of Harvard social scientists and psychologists interviewed more than 3,000 Soviet refugees in Europe and the United States. The directors of the study, Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, hoped to use the information to create a “working model” of the Soviet Union to better understand other advanced industrial societies. It was called the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, and The Soviet Citizen was the major fruit of its research. The Soviet Citizen is an attempt to capture what the authors call the “social-psychology of Soviet life.” […]