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 […]

Published: New York, 1891 By 1891, Reinhard Baumeister, though less familiar to American engineers, had already established himself as one of Germany’s leading authorities on urban planning.  The translator of this text, careful to account for differences between German and American conceptions of urban cleanliness, quotes Baumeister in his introduction: “The author,” the translator writes, “credits us very truly with being ‘less willing to put up with the inconvenience of overflowed streets and cellars.’”  There’s no question that turmoil would have ensued, had this fundamental difference in expectations been ignored by the designers of sewage systems in the United States. […]

Published: New York, 1890 The dream of building a canal across the Central American isthmus dates almost to the moment when Europeans first spotted that narrow piece of land.  Construction of the Nicaragua Canal was abandoned for lack of funds in 1893, but not before the U.S. government had stockpiled the equipment and established the infrastructure necessary to complete a mile of the canal itself. Just over a decade later, construction of the Panama Canal would begin. With the Panama Canal now subject to traffic jams, and too small to accommodate some of today’s massive ships, talk of building a […]

Published: Paris, 1889 The 1880s witnessed a surge of pivotal and enduring electrical innovations: domestic-use light bulbs, alternating current motors and transformers, power stations, hydroelectricity, electric elevators, streetcars, dishwashers, and ovens. By decade’s end, plenty of electrical appliances for the home existed. However, due to a variety of factors—most of all a lack of uniform power distribution in Europe and the U.S. (see 1885’s entry on the Schuyler Electric Light Company)—such things remained, for the time being, the domain of the academy and the rich. L’électricité a la Maison was out to change that. Neither a cash-in on the electricity […]

Published: London, 1888 In the year of this book’s publication, Lewis Mills Norton established MIT’s first chemical engineering program.  It’s not hard to imagine this young group of chemical engineers perhaps using their labs after hours, carefully following the authors’ directions for preparing both the silver solution and the albumenized paper necessary for producing silver prints. But the authors’ preface suggests that not every photographer believed in their espoused process.  “The one defect of silver printing,” they write, “is the possibility of its results fading; but surely it is better to be beautiful, if fading, than permanent and ugly. It […]