History 398 - Technologies and Their Societies

Resources on the Web

History of Technology links at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) site
Explore the WWW Virtual Library of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The Linda Hall Library has an extensive collection of scientific and engineering journals, monographs, and conference proceedings, plus material pertinent to standards and patents.
The Science Museum in London recently established two new sites: Ingenious contextualises and presents 30,000 images of pictures and artefacts from the museum's collections", and Making the Modern World is an animated history of technology since 1750. Both sites are worth visiting throughout the course.

The Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin offers a comprehensive database of machine drawings from the early modern era.
The Institute and Museum of History of Science in Florence has an exhibit on Engineers of the Renaissance with a selection of engineering drawings from the period.
English Windmills is just one of the websites of the International Windmill Ring. See also The Mills Archive, which has a new online catalog.
Professor Stephen Murray of Columbia University has assembled a stunning website describing all aspects of Amiens Cathedral. It is worth taking some time to explore the site. For a closer look at some of the other cathedrals we've been discussing, see

Spartacus.com has a page on the textile industry with texts and pictures pertinent to the next two weeks' discussion.
For pictures of the machines discussed in Lecture 3 see Illustrations of Textile Manufacture in the Industrial Revolution from Professor Ronald Tobey's course at UC Riverside.
For a collection of original texts and illustrations of the steam engine, visit the Steam Engine Library at the University of Rochester.

The Science and Society Picture Library has images of a model of the Collycroft worsted textile mill in Bedworth
Roland Marchand of the UC Davis History Project has posted a slide archive that includes wonderful images of early factories in both England and the U.S.
The town of Belper has a history page that describes the coming of Arkwright's and Strutts' new factories to the area. Belper North Mill is now the site of the Derwent Valley Mills Visitor's Centre. Pigot's Commercial Directory of Derbyshire shows what Belper, a small village in 1750, had become by 1835. A native of Belper, Samuel Slater, brought the new spinning factory to the United States.
The Spartacus Encyclopedia has a page on Child Labour in the 19th Century with a variety of sources and illustrations pertinent to the new factory life as a whole.
The Lowell mills have become the site of the Lowell National Historical Park, which has an extensive website on the history of the mills and of the textile industry in general.

The McMaster University Archive of the History of Economic Thought has lists of publications and online texts of the major works of most of the people mentioned in Lecture 10, in particular

Adam Smith
David Ricardo; see his statement of his Iron Law of Wages.
Thomas Robert Malthus
Charles Babbage, including an online text of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
Karl Marx

An online edition of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help at the Library of Economics and Liberty

On Charles Babbage, see The Babbage Pages; additional links can be found at Xerox's nanotech site
John Howe's pin-making machine, which Babbage talks about in par. 239 of Chap. 19
On Marx and Marxism see

The John B. Jervis Papers
Harpers Ferry National Historical Park: The Armory Machinery Drawings of James H. Burton
Views of Harpers Ferry Armory
Illustrations of Waterpower at Harpers Ferry
For the Erie Canal, see

The brief history at the New York State Canal site
A fuller account at the University of Rochester History Deparment site
Canvass White is representative of the early American engineers mentioned in Cowan's book and in lecture.

Ruth Cowan talks about inventors and the patent system. The Rothschild Peterson Patent Model Museum contains some of the working models required by the U.S. Patent Office as part of a patent application.
The Thomas A Edison Papers at Rutgers have placed his patents online.
Blueprint for Change chronicles the life and work of Lewis H. Latimer, an African-American draftsman and inventor, who worked for the Edison companies and then General Electric from the mid-1880s to the late 1920s.

The Networked Multimedia Information Services offer an Introduction to Machine Tools, with pictures and videos of machine tools and their use.
Or visit Penn State's online Student Machine Shop Laboratory with illustrated instructions for carrying out the major machining operations.
There are a lot of Model T Fords still around.
The Model T Automotive Heritage Complex, or T-Plex, is establishing a museum at the site of Ford's Piquette Avenue plant and already has an informative website
The Detroit News' "Rearview Mirror Photo Gallery" has posted a packet of 24 postcards with views of the Highland Park Plant in 1917
Visit and browse through the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, especially the Collections page. Pay special attention to the Model T in The Showroom.

Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken houses the papers of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a member of its class of 1883, and has established the F.W. Taylor Project to make the papers available online.

The Montgomery-Ward site at Chicago Landmarks
The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 at Duke University holds some 9,000 images.
Ben Wattenberg devoted a segment of his PBS series, "The First Measured Century", to the Lynds' Middletown.
Visit the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University
From the Arthur Vidich's introduction to Rita Caccamo's Return to Middletown (1999), a critical study of the Lynds' work.

The webpage for my recent Freshman Seminar, "The World of the Computer", offers an extensive set of readings and web links about computing and its history.
The main WWW site for the history of computing is here. Take some time to tour its links.
Babbage intended his difference engine to be made of brass and iron, but other materials will work. Take a look at Andrew Carol's LEGO Difference Engine.
Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing, the Enigma, maintains an extensive Turing home page, which includes a link to a working Turing Machine applet); another Turing machine emulator for Wintel machines can be found here.
Some links to information about John von Neumann
Here is the Army's press release announcing the ENIAC.

A new project is underway at the Software History Center to assemble materials for the history of mainframe software.
Visit the Computer Controlled LEGO Factory at the University of Massachusetts