Published: London, 1917 The tank. The U-boat. The fighter plane. The machine gun. The flamethrower. Poison gas.  These military technologies were all developed or enhanced during World War I, the first time science, technology, and mass production played a critical role in the course of a war. These technologies also played a critical role in the war’s unprecedented carnage. Defined by destructiveness, scale, and technical innovation, World War I is seen as a watershed, the advent of the modern age. With our knowledge of the part “war inventions” played in the First World War’s horrors, today it seems a bit […]

Published: New York and London, 1916 Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was among America’s foremost novelists during the first third of the 20th century, and several of her books continue to be both widely read and highly esteemed. Among them are The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize). Wharton spent the last three decades of her life in France. During World War I, horrified by the devastation being visited on civilian populations, she worked tirelessly on behalf of orphans and refugees. She visited the front lines, […]

Published: New York and London, 1915 These days we recognize advertising as big business: thirty-second Superbowl spots sell for eye-popping amounts each year. And it’s hard to deny that advertising is effective: just glimpsing the logo of a favorite junk food brand can create a hankering that’s positively Pavlovian. There’s a science behind successful advertisements, which the author of today’s book, Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868-1964), attempts to explain. As he states in the foreword, it is through “scientific management, the painstaking collection of statistics and their intelligent arrangement, and the exercise of … common-sense” that we reduce the “element of […]

Published: London, 1914 The automobile, the machine that so profoundly shapes our culture, economy, politics, and environment, appeared in its earliest guise in France in 1760 as an artillery-hauling, steam-powered three-wheeler.  Invented by army officer Nicholas Cugnot, the ungainly tricycle’s career was cut short by a crash. In the 19th century, a variety of vehicles powered by both steam and electricity proliferated. The gasoline-burning internal combustion engine, the automotive technology that (as we all know) would ultimately prevail over steam and electricity, was invented independently by Germans Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in the 1880s. By the end of the […]

Published: New York, 1913 Books made up of scale drawings of architectural details aren’t unusual, and MIT owns many such publications. This particular title is notable first because it’s a fine example of the genre. It also happens to contain details from some historic houses that are right in Cambridge, not far from MIT. But the book’s creators are noteworthy as well. Lois Lilley Howe was born in Cambridge and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She then studied architecture at MIT (class of 1906), after which she went on to open the first architectural […]

Published: Washington, 1912 Desirous for a book that would finally standardize colors and their names, Robert Ridgway, an ornithologist, took upon himself the mammoth task of producing just such a volume – covering more than a thousand colors.  The enduring value of his labor is evidenced by the naturalists and artists who, a century later, continue to use it as a standard reference.  Much of this value must certainly lie in the work’s impressive display of color itself: distributed among 53 plates is a true sample for every one of the 1,115 colors Ridgway has named. The challenge of producing […]

Published: Washington D.C., 1911 The California Gold Rush occurred between 1848 and 1855, but gold mining continues in the state to this day. Placer mining was the initial extraction method, but it was replaced by hydraulic mining of Tertiary gravels in channels, especially in the central and northern Sierra Nevada. In hydraulic mining, high-pressure streams of water were blasted at gravel beds to separate gold from the gravel. The method produced a lot of gold, peaking in the 1870s. However, the debris damaged and polluted streams, which led to prohibitions. Drift mining and dredging followed. Several members of the United […]

Published: Cambridge University Press, 1910 This is the first of three volumes of a monumental work, the result of years of collaboration by philosophical greats Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (Whitehead’s pupil). Principia Mathematica (a.k.a. “PM”) is a foundational text in mathematical logic. PM set forth an argument for logicism, the idea that all mathematics can be reduced to logic. Whitehead and Russell posit that all mathematical truths can be rendered as logical truths and all mathematical proofs can be also be expressed as logical proofs. It is hard to overstate PM’s influence. It popularized modern mathematical logic and […]

Published: Chicago, 1909 After successfully managing the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Daniel Burnham made a name for himself as one of the premier city planners in the United States. His Plan of Chicago, developed with Edward H. Bennett, remains a landmark in the field. The Plan proposes a number of extraordinary ideas, some of which have been forgotten, others that have left their mark on the Chicago cityscape. Few tourists, for example, fail to visit Navy Pier. But did you know that this popular attraction is just one of a pair of piers that Burnham and Bennett […]

Published: Philadelphia, ca. 1908 The MIT Libraries own just a small number of titles aimed specifically at juvenile readers, and those few have generally made it into the collection by virtue of their provenance. A case in point: Harry Castlemon’s Our Fellows, or, Skirmishes with the Swamp Dragoons. Castlemon (real name: Charles Austin Fosdick) was born in New York State in 1842. He was a driving force behind the creation of “series books” for youngsters – a publishing phenomenon that would continue into the present with no end in sight, and come to include such moneymakers as Nancy Drew, The […]