Excerpt:
Personal author:
Roebling, John Augustus, 1806-1869.
Title:
Long and short span railway bridges. by John A. Roebling.
Annotation:
Facsimile of the book wriiten by Roebling in 1889. Also available in pdf and tiff formats.
Personal author:
Roebling, John Augustus, 1806-1869.
Title:
Long and short span railway bridges. by John A. Roebling.
Facsimile of the book wriiten by Roebling in 1889. Also available in pdf and tiff formats.
Today, we meet the father and son who built the Brooklyn Bridge. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
For me, the story of John Roebling begins in Kentucky, not far from where I used to live. On Sunday afternoons my wife and I would take our kids to see Old High Bridge over the Kentucky River. A plaque credits John Roebling with having started this old bridge in 1853. Actually, the bridge there today has been entirely reconceived. Still, the glorious spider web of steel emerging out of the quiet hilly isolation around it powerfully evokes Roebling's sense of design.
John and Washington Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge. Essay by John H. Lienhard.
Each of the original 33 leaves or folios (66 pages) are reproduced here in digital form for educational use only.
If your screen is set at 800 by 600 pixel resolution the large versions of the pages will appear close to the size of the originals which are approximately 240mm x160mm.
The pages follow the orientation and order in which they were bound together and here the usual convention is followed with each leaf or folio being numbered and the front recto and back verso identified with "r" and "v" respectively.
This is a University of Newcastle archive of Villard de Honnecourt's portfolio. Pages from Villard's notebook are available as separate digital photographs, though a web page with compressed versions of every image allows users to scan for a specific drawing. A "search by page number" feature has also been included. A history of Villard, a bibliography, and links to several websites can be found via a link at the bottom of the main web page.
Consists of the author's A work on bridge-building : consisting of two essays, the one elementary and general, the other giving original plans and practical details for iron and wooden bridges. Utica, N.Y. : H.H. Curtis, 1847, plus supplementary text, Notes in correction and explanation of the original text, and Central forces.
Facsimile of Whipple's 1847 essays which include original plans and practical details for iron and wooden bridges. Also available in text and tiff formats.
The first iron bridge was constructed in 1779 at Coalbrookdale, a cast-iron arch. Cast iron then began to replace stone, quite successfully in arch bridges, but the attempt to use cast-iron beams ended in the failure of Robert Stephenson's Dee Bridge. Thereafter, cast iron was used for compressive members only, and engineers turned to wrought iron as a tougher, more reliable material, using it first in massive tubular girders riveted together from the small plates which were all that were available at the time. Wrought-iron link chains were used for suspension bridges by Telford and Brunel.
In the United States, iron was expensive and largely imported from Britian because of the primitive state of the domestic iron industry. Wood, however, was abundant and cheap, and it was good hardwood that made an excellent material of construction. Wood, therefore, was the material most often used for even major bridges, with spans greater than 50 feet. We are not talking here of the trestles and king-post trusses used for minor bridges, but bridges that crossed the rivers and gorges that abounded. Two kinds of bridges were in common use, the lattice truss and the trussed arch, of which there were as many varieties as there were builders. Bridge builders were self-taught craftsmen and amateurs, for the most part.
The Internet boom and bust of 1996 to 2002 was the most important business phenomenon of the past several decades. In the wake of this historic period, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from our past mistakes and successes.
To help us learn from history, we are creating the Business Plan Archive (BPA) to collect business plans and related documents from the dot com era. These plans – the “blueprints” that lay out the assumptions and strategies of Internet entrepreneurs – will enable entrepreneurs and researchers to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research.
The Business Plan Archive, a project of Prof. David Kirsch at the University of Maryland, collects business plans and related documents from the dot com era to preserve and provide them for study of the Internet boom and bust of the last decade. The communication and records of these companies were all created electronically, and in the Archive are the Word documents, Power Point presentations, and emails of more than 2,000 failed businesses. “Top Ten Lessons from the Dot Com Meltdown” and “A Statistical Summary of the Dot Com Shakeout” provide context for the documents, which include funding requests, memos, draft press releases, anecdotal descriptions or images, and contract and investment-related information. For some companies there is a collection overview as well. The Archive can be searched by company name, alphabetical listing, market sector, market audience, or type of available information, making it easy to find companies of interest. Visitors are able to add more information to the Archive about any company’s events, files, or background, or just add a comment. A thorough Question and Answer Section accompanies the materials, along with links to the numerous articles and news coverage of the Archive.
Although these achievements are fundamental to modern mathematics and physics, it is less well known that Newton himself placed great value on his private researches into theology and alchemy. Interest in the wealth of surviving manuscript material in these areas has increased dramatically in recent years, and the Newton Project was formed in 1998 to make all Newton's texts, both 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' (including those papers relevant to his three decades service at the Royal Mint), available to a broad readership in a form that is at once scholarly and accessible. The Project aims to create a printed edition of Newton's theological, alchemical and administrative writings and an electronic edition of all his writings, including his correspondence.
The Newton Project is an effort to release online the complete record of Isaac Newton’s published and unpublished writings. Certainly, Newton was one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, and the Project offers a substantial contribution to this field by offering historians unprecedented access to his archives. Although the work is far from finished, the text offered on the site thus far is both a key resource for historians and a model for the online publication of historic manuscripts.
The greatest success of the Newton Project is its multi-layered presentation of the historical manuscripts. The Project fully utilizes the hypertext medium to balance the historical integrity of the subject with acts of editorial clarification. Each transcription can be displayed in several formats. The first, “normalised,” format is edited and omits deleted text, expands unfamiliar abbreviations, corrects spelling, and offers something like a final draft, which represents what Newton most likely intended a reader to see in his text. With this option, the editors allow a viewer to quickly access Newton’s writing without struggling to decipher the meanings of difficult marks and indications. The next format, termed “diplomatic,” attempts to preserve the process of the text’s original production by graphically indicating text that has been marked through, squeezed between the lines, or includes special characters. When a viewer rolls the mouse over these notations, a pop-up textbox gives an editorial note describing the nature of each irregularity. In addition to these two formats, photographic images of some manuscripts are available for closer reading and verification. A viewer can easily switch between these three formats to find the level of authenticity or editorial influence with which he or she is comfortable.
The site is well designed, attractive, and professional. The main text appears under the title banner in the middle and right side of the screen, while a list of navigation links on the left leads to a description of the project’s background, biographical information, and sections that highlight new, featured, and upcoming additions to the site. Individual pages are also cross-linked to make navigating the site simple. The site also includes an extensive bibliography, a guide to the source collections, and dozens of links to other Newton sites as well as many other history-of-science and manuscript publishing sites.
A final important consideration of online history is the concept of permanence. This idea is especially pertinent to the Newton Project because they only recently extended their funding for another five years. But, to the Project’s credit, the creators have already arranged for the online transcriptions to be deposited with the Oxford Text Archive to guarantee sustainability in the unlikely event that additional funding is unavailable in the future. Once again, the Newton Project has successfully addressed a major challenge of online history.
Miles Travis
Center for History and New Media
February 5, 2005
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)
An historical compendium of the people, departments, schools, research centres and affiliated organisations that make up the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, with references to archival materials and a bibliography of historical published literature.