Contemporary (Post-WWII)

Science & Society Picture Library represents the collections of the National Museum of Science & Industry, Science Museum, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, National Railway Museum.

"Before the Web" is an online research project designed for the practitioners of the online services industry and its era. It is an interactive, digital variation of the oral history, the most common traditional technique used to collect the first-hand accounts from people who witnessed or took part in important events and eras.

Technocapitalism is a new form of market capitalism that is rooted in technological invention and innovation.  It can be considered an emerging era, now in its early stage, that is supported by such intangibles as creativity and knowledge.

Am I pregnant? The answer to this age-old question once demanded a combination of guesswork, intuition, and time. In 1978, however, the long wait to know for sure became a thing of the past. Trumpeted by advertisements as “a private little revolution,” the first home pregnancy tests started appearing on drug store shelves that year. A quarter of a century later, innovations promise to make even the telltale thin blue line obsolete. This web site looks at the history of the home pregnancy test—one of the most ubiquitous home healthcare products in America—and examines its place in our culture.

The home pregnancy test works by identifying the presence of the “pregnancy hormone,” human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), in urine. Research that led to a sensitive, accurate test for hCG was done by scientists in the Reproductive Research Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at NIH.

This is the calendar FAQ. Its purpose is to give an overview of the Christian, Hebrew, Persian, and Islamic calendars in common use. It will provide a historical background for the Christian calendar, plus an overview of the French Revolutionary calendar, the Maya calendar, and the Chinese calendar.

Welcome to the Invisible Revolution, the story of Doug Engelbart, the man who invented much of the computer environment we live in today - and still few know his name. This is his story, and the story of his fellow dreamers, thinkers, doers - revolutionaries - who changed our lives forever.

The history of engineering can be roughly divided into four overlapping phases, each marked by a revolution:

Pre-scientific revolution: The prehistory of modern engineering features ancient master builders and Renaissance engineers such as Leonardo da Vinci.

Industrial revolution: From the eighteenth through early nineteenth century, civil and mechanical engineers changed from practical artists to scientific professionals.

Second industrial revolution: In the century before World War II, chemical, electrical, and other science-based engineering branches developed electricity, telecommunications, cars, airplanes, and mass production.

Information revolution: As engineering science matured after the war, microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications jointly produced information technology.

   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.

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.

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.