Excerpt:
Research Aids for the Nineteenth Century
Research Aids for the Nineteenth Century
The two greatest misconceptions about medicine arise primarily from our modern attempts at interpreting the medical system of the Middle Ages. The first misconception is to see medicine in the Middle Ages as an unsophisticated system. Early scholars of medieval medicine found medieval doctors' theories ridiculous when compared to modern ones. Charles Singer, for example, found medieval medicine demonstrative of "the wilting mind of the Dark Ages." <1> Singer also believed that medieval medicine, specifically the Anglo-Saxon herbals, "lacked any rational element which might mark the beginnings of scientific advance."<2> But recently, historians like M.L. Cameron in Anglo-Saxon Medicineand John Riddle in Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance attempt to validate medieval medicine in light of modern medicine. By analyzing common herbals, both Cameron and Riddle have found a few recipes that have therapeutic merit.
This is a brief outline of the development of string theory, the details of which will eventually fill many large volumes written by many people directly and indirectly involved in this rich and fascinating story.
iCivilEngineer.com is a knowledge portal specially designed for civil engineering professionals and students. It has two goals in mind: 1) collect and catalog valuable civil engineering relevant Internet resources so that people can find information fast; 2) explore how to take advantage of Internet technology to serve the civil engineering community.
Since it started as a web directory of civil engineering in 1999, iCivilEngineer.com has been growing quickly. Now it offers:
* News Center - It hosts civil engineering news, IT news, big project information and recent civil engineering failures.
* Career Center - It contains best job search sites, PE exam guide, academic department index and virtual bookshelf.
* Tools Center - It offers convenient online tools such as unit conversion, stock quote and local weather.
* Resource Center - It is a collection of valuable web resources in civil engineering. The web directory is organized by hundreds of technical topics. The search engine indexes more than 15,000 web documents in the area of civil engineering. Other resources, such as famous civil engineers and landmarks, should be of interest to users.
Welcome to my website, the Bell System Memorial. For those of us who were old enough to remember the days of "Ma Bell" you should find plenty of memories on this website of the "good old days" - and perhaps some not-so-good old days - under the Bell System monopoly.
A Switchboard to the History of the Telephone: The Bell System Memorial Website
In the golden days of the Bell telephone monopoly, telephones did not beep, chirp or yodel. Telephones made only one sound: they rang. In those golden days, there was no confusing variety of telephone providers, vying with each other to offer better long distance deals. There was one provider for local and long-distance calls, and this was Bell.
Ma Bell, the company of companies, was much more than a telephone provider: it was a symbol of American enterprise, of innovation and progress. Bell was not a company in the strict sense, but was an aggregate term for AT&T encompassing 24 Bell operating companies that provided local phone services. Under the umbrella was also the AT&T long distance service, an equipment manufacturing arm known as Western Electric, and the research and development division "Bell Laboratories." At the time of its break-up after de-regulation in 1984, Bell was the largest employer in the United States. Bell had not only provided a telephone for the majority of American households, but also a regular income for over a million workers.
The Bell System Memorial website is dedicated to an era of the telephone that was lost with de-regulation. It is a memorial to the technology of the telephone, and a memorial to the workers who made the phones ring. The website is a labor of love by David Massey, a private telephone enthusiast who was not associated with any of the former Bell companies.
The design of the website is clear and intelligent, resembling the functionality of a telephone switchboard: The main index site provides four options for different groups to enter the site: for students and teachers, for former employees, for historians and researchers, and for hobbyists and collectors. By providing these different entrance points, David Massey manages to address a wide audience, and at the same time tailors more specific information to a variety of groups.
When entering through the former employee button, visitors can access a fascinating collection of stories by former AT&T, Western Electric, Bell Labs, and Bell Operating Company employees. In this section, former employees recall "the wonders of working at Ma-Bell." They write about the stages of their careers at Bell, their most extraordinary work experiences, and the comradery among Bell employees. Not all stories reflect a harmonious relationship between the employer and the employees: Peter W. Koch, a former Western Electric installer, tells of a long strike in 1952 to raise the per diem rate for traveling installers by one dollar. In 1958, due to a recession, "about a third of the installers were laid off." Among them was Peter W. Koch, who "was never recalled." This section also gives a sense of the skills that were lost in the course of technological progress. Mary Clemence, who worked as a switchboard operator in Michigan in the mid 1960s, recalls her skills in handling a switchboard from the 1920s. "I've realized for some time that I had an incredibly unique experience using that kind of equipment, at a time when most of the country had direct dialing for local and long distance calls."
In addition to these stories, visitors can access a wealth of material through a navigation bar on the left hand side: a short history of the Bell logo, recordings of Jane Barbe's voice, Yellow Pages for telephone collectors and much more. A search engine helps to find pathways through Bell's A-Z. A What's New page keeps regular visitors up-to-date about additions to the site.
For historians of technology, for students and teachers, for anyone who has phone-nostalgia and wants to have a good time, the Bell System Memorial is the place to go. This website rings.
Katja Hering
Center for History and New Media
April 22, 2004
Moments of Discovery tells the story of two scientific discoveries in the scientists' own words. (You can read the text or hear their actual voices.) The discovery of nuclear fission was a momentous and complex sequence of events where many famous scientists interacted with each other and the world at large. The detection of the first optical pulsar shows the work of a few scientists on a much finer, more personal scale, following moment by moment as an important discovery unfolded. Teachers' guides offer supplementary materials and ideas for classroom use.
Before we continue describing the evolution of ways to mark the passage of time, perhaps we should broadly define what constitutes a clock. All clocks must have two basic components:
a regular, constant or repetitive process or action to mark off equal increments of time. Early examples of such processes included the movement of the sun across the sky, candles marked in increments, oil lamps with marked reservoirs, sand glasses (hourglasses), and in the Orient, knotted cords and small stone or metal mazes filled with incense that would burn at a certain pace. Modern clocks use a balance wheel, pendulum, vibrating crystal, or electromagnetic waves associated with the internal workings of atoms as their regulators.
a means of keeping track of the increments of time and displaying the result. Our ways of keeping track of the passage of time include the position of clock hands and digital time displays.
The history of timekeeping is the story of the search for ever more consistent actions or processes to regulate the rate of a clock.
The Academic Medical Library of Paris (BIUM) has the pleasure to announce
the e-publication of M.J.B. Orfila's works on its website. With introductions by J.R. Bertomeu (Universitat de Valencia) and D. Gourevitch (EPHE Paris). (Site available only in French)
This guide is intended for historians who want to use Geographical Information Systems (GIS). It describes how to create GIS databases and how to use GIS to perform historical research. Its aims are to:
Define GIS and outline how it can be used in historical research
Evaluate the way GIS models the world
Describe how to get data into a GIS
Demonstrate the basic operations that GIS offers to explore a database
Review how time is handled in GIS
Explain how GIS can be used for simple mapping and more advanced forms of visualisation
Discuss quantitative data analysis within GIS
Illustrate the use of GIS for qualitative analysis
Summarise documenting and preserving GIS datasets
The book provides a broad sweep of GIS knowledge relevant to historians without assuming prior knowledge. It includes case studies from a variety of historical projects that have used GIS and an extensive reading list of GIS texts relevant to historians.
From the Multi-Repository Mathematics Collections site you will gain access to three of the most significant mathematics collections digitally available: The Mathematics Collection from Cornell, the Mathematics Collection from Göttingen, and the University of Michigan's Historical Math Collection. From this access point you will be able to search across all three of these collections, and examine results as you would normally using the University of Michigan's user interface. It is important to point out that the University of Göttingen has only one item for which a fulltext search can be performed, but bibliographic searches across the collection are possible.