Personal

The history of mathematics goes a long way back with devices and methods of calculation. Starting with the ancient Abacus, the slide rule and the logarithms, the mechanical calculating machines, the electromechanical calculators and finally the electronic computer.
This site deals mainly with the mechanical calculating machines from a collector's point of view. I hope you enjoy this site and find it as useful as many other cyberspace citizens have.

Alan Turing would probably have laughed at the idea of being called a great philosopher, or any kind of philosopher. He called himself a mathematician. But his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence has become one of the most cited in modern philosophical literature. This is principally because he brought the new and rigorous mathematical concept of computability to bear on traditional problems of mind and body, free-will and determinism.

What if Hitler had been able to get what he wanted in Munich, so appeasement had actually worked? What if Goddard, von Braun, Oberth, Sanger, Korolev, Tsiolovsky, and other rocket scientists had been taken more seriously and had been properly funded? Would Germany have put the first man into space? Could Goddard, had he lived, have put a man on the moon without von Braun? Come and join the discussion, click either picture above.

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.

A
new site
that is dedicated
to the memory of the
many African-American inventors
that have helped
to develop this land of Diaspora that we have built.

The photographs in these pages were found in a book about Admiral Dewey, the Battle of Manila Bay and the Philippine Campaign: Life and Heroic Deeds of Admiral Dewey including Battles in the Philippines (Globe Bible Publishing Co., Philadelphia, 1899). Some of the pictures seem to predate the Spanish-American War, though. The images of the common sailors and shipboard scenes give a fascinating glimpse of what life in the navy was like 100 years, and more, ago, and also put a human face on history.

Periodic Table with Atomic Weights, date of discovery, and scientist that discovered

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison was not born into poverty in a backwater mid-western town. Actually, he was born (on Feb. 11, 1847) to middle-class parents in the bustling port of Milan, Ohio, a community that - next to Odessa, Russia - was the largest wheat shipping center in the world. In 1854, his family moved to the vibrant community of Port Huron, Michigan, which ultimately surpassed the commercial preeminence of both Milan and Odessa....

There are dozens if not hundreds of military history sites, and we've made no attempt to list them all. (We've let others do that.) Some of the most complete links are given below