Published: Bristol, England, 1901 MIT was founded on the idea that an excellent education, based on a solid foundation in the sciences, was the surest road to technological and industrial innovation. A century ago, England’s Association of Technical Institutions was thinking along the same lines, and recognizing that the overall health and success of the nation was tied to the robustness of its industry. This pamphlet published by the Association opens with a stern warning: “ … it is a matter of life and death for us to maintain our position as a great industrial nation … we cannot do […]

Published: New York, 1900 The nineteenth century teemed with technological developments, and the enthusiasm of the age shines forth in the introduction to Flame, Electricity and the Camera: “As we hear the whir of the dynamo or listen at the telephone, as we turn the button of an incandescent lamp or travel in an electromobile, we are partakers in a revolution more swift and profound than has ever before been enacted upon earth.” Published in 1900 — at the close of a century that witnessed the Industrial Revolution, the advent of electric power, and the development of photography — Iles’ […]

Published: New York, Edinburgh, and London, 1899 The term “wireless telegraphy” conveys more than just its single, literal meaning. Although it describes a tremendous leap forward in communication technology, it’s a phrase – not unlike “horseless carriage” – that can’t quite leave the past behind. The Morse telegraph had transformed human communication in the mid-19th century by making it possible, for the first time, for humans to communicate instantly across long distances, via signals traveling between two points connected by wire. Telegraphy marked an unprecedented break with the past: information could now be transmitted from one place to another, day […]

Published: Philadelphia, 1898 The Spanish-American War was different from all of America’s previous wars: it was brief, it was fought entirely offshore, and it was, according to this book’s author, “a missionary war … the act of a great nation that, having won for itself the blessings of freedom … was generous enough and brave enough to take up the gage of battle in behalf of another people struggling to be free.” The war ended with Spain brought to its knees, and with the United States not only triumphant but in control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The […]

Published: Padua, 1897 Galileo’s letter to his friend Cristina di Lorena, originally published in 1636, is an appeal for the reconciliation of science and religion. This was a common struggle for scientists in his day. Indeed, few would have understood this struggle better than Galileo, an alleged heretic who claimed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the known universe. For this assertion, he remained under house arrest by order of the Roman Inquisition from 1633 to the end of his life. What is most striking about this book, however, is its incredibly diminutive size.  “For many […]

Published: Glasgow, 1896 When German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of X-rays at the end of 1895, the mysterious rays and the eerie photographs they took understandably caused quite a stir among both scientists and the public. Röntgen’s photos of balance-weights in a closed box, the chamber of a shotgun, and especially of his wife’s hand with visible bones seemed almost magical. Röntgen ascertained the existence of X-rays when he was performing experiments using a Crookes tube, a kind of cathode ray tube. Repeating an experiment carried out previously by physicist Philipp Lenard, Röntgen happened to notice that a […]

Published: Braunschweig, 1895 Though initially it seems to be an unremarkable, standard textbook of its day, this volume by German physicist Otto Lehmann (1855-1922) holds a surprise for those who make it through to the final folded plates in the back, for the plates contain vivid, citrus-colored images depicting currents running along power lines under various conditions. They’re striking and almost psychedelic in their intensity. The MIT Libraries own two copies of Elektricität und Licht, one of which was purchased for the Department of Physics the year it was published. Three years after the publication of this work, the author […]

Published: Boston, 1894 Originally published as A Brave Black Regiment, this account of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry tells the story of one of the first all-black regiments to fight for the Union in the Civil War. The story is familiar to many, as the letters of the regiment’s commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, were the screenwriter’s primary source for the acclaimed 1989 film Glory. The most important piece of public art in the city of Boston also takes the 54th as its subject: Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, situated on Beacon Street directly across from the Massachusetts […]

Published: London, 1893 2 volumes Today he’s known for such classic science fiction novels as The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), so people are often surprised to learn that the first original book-length work published by H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was a textbook.  Wells had studied biology at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, London under the great T.H. Huxley, on a scholarship for teacher trainees. It was there that he got his start writing fiction in the Science Schools Journal, which he founded and edited himself. Wells’ early career didn’t go as planned. […]

Published: Paris, 1892 How does one start as a medical doctor and end up the father of cinematography?  An obsession with movement, that’s how. Trained in the 1850s in the emerging field of physiology, Etienne-Jules Marey’s ambition to graphically represent movement resulted in a host of advancements ranging from establishing a link between heart rate and blood pressure to inventing the first portable motion picture camera. While completing his dissertation on blood circulation, Marey was unsatisfied with the instruments he had to record measurements, so he invented — and manufactured — his own. The first was a “pulse writer,” a […]