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Three leading scientific organizations, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the American Institute of Physics (Center for History of Physics) (AIP), have formed a consortium to experiment with using the World Wide Web to locate, create and preserve historical documentation in science and technology. For selected research topics, pioneers are urged to submit personal recollections, documents or pointers to collections of documents, and comments on materials submitted by others. The material will be gathered in databases, through discussion forums and other mechanisms familiar to most scientists. If we succeed, we will have shown other scientific organizations how to establish low-cost mechanisms for gathering much historical information that would otherwise be lost.

A novel experiment is currently underway in the geophysical sciences. Thanks to funding from the Sloan Foundation, geoscientists who have worked on a number of pathbreaking developments now have an opportunity to document and write their own history. The AGU, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Institute of Physics have established sites on the World Wide Web to which geoscientists may contribute their recollections and other unpublished material for the histories of Solar Variability and Climate Change; Black Smokers; Greenland Ice Drilling Projects; General Atmospheric Circulation Models; and the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment.

Profiled here are African American men and women who have contributed to the advancement of science and engineering. The accomplishments of the past and present can serve as pathfinders to present and future engineers and scientists. African American chemists, biologists, inventors, engineers, and mathematicians have contributed in both large and small ways that can be overlooked when chronicling the history of science. By describing the scientific history of selected African American men and women we can see how the efforts of individuals have advanced human understanding in the world around us.

PhotoNet is an online database containing thousands of images from the Archives' collection of visual material.

The Census Bureau's solution was to have a competition to find a new method by which the census could be tabulated. Herman Hollerith entered and won this competition. With his victory, not only did Hollerith make it possible to complete the census in a reasonable time frame, but his methods, which were used well into the 1960s, offered a foundation for the future collection of all types of data1. With his invention Hollerith allowed for the creation of one of the most dominant corporations of the computer age and secured his place in history as the father of information processing.

Welcome to the world of physicist, biophysicist, and "scientist of conscience" Leo Szilard (1898-1964). How do you say it? Say SIL-ahrd.

Szilard's ideas included the linear accelerator, cyclotron, electron microscope, and nuclear chain reaction. Equally important was his insistence that scientists accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their work.

In his classic 1929 paper on Maxwell's Demon, Szilard identified the unit or "bit" of information. The World Wide Web that you now travel, and the computers that make it possible, show the importance of his long-unappreciated idea.

Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.

Although Hollerith made a very significant contribution to the development of the modern electronic computer with his punched card technology not all his ideas were similar great successes. In the 1880s, at the same time as he was developing his first punched card system, he invented a new brake system for trains. However his electrically actuated brake system lost out to the Westinghouse steam-actuated brake.

Szilard's ideas included the linear accelerator, cyclotron, electron microscope, and nuclear chain reaction. Equally important was his insistence that scientists accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their work.

In 1969, a group of women and men of Seneca Falls created the National Women's Hall of Fame, believing that the contribution of American women deserved a permanent home in the small village where it all began. The Hall is home to exhibits, artifacts of historical interest, a research library and office. The National Women's Hall of Fame, a national membership organization, holds as its mission:

"To honor in perpetuity these women, citizens of the United States of America whose contributions to the arts, athletics, business, education, government, the humanities, philanthropy and science, have been the greatest value for the development of their country."©
The Hall is a shrine to some of the greatest women in the history of this country and a tribute that grows annually with each induction ceremony as we learn to appreciate more about the wonderful contributions that women make to our civilization.