Consumer Technology

The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Diderot, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate the ideas of the French Enlightment. The impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and social developments of its time.

National policies and programs in science and technology are among the historical issues documented in the estimated 20 million pages of archival material at the Gerald R. Ford Library. Some of these materials are summarized below, but more is available in many different collections. The additional files on energy and environmental policies in particular are vast. Anyone may use these collections, and Library staff can provide database searches and other assistance at finding material on specific topics

This exhibit features instruments that illustrate how innovative makers and players combined the guitar with a pickup (sensor) and amplifier to create a new instrument and a new sound that profoundly changed popular music--blues, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock and roll--in the 20th century.

The story of the Nobel Prizes and of the people who have won them has a peculiar interest about it in our own time, not least because at the end of our own century - the century of the Nobel Prize-winners - the world will enter a new millennium. Such a conjunction 1,000 years ago created both interest and concern. How will our century be related not only to the next century, but to the next millennium? To what extent are the Nobel Prize-winners, outstanding in their own generation, pointing the way? Ours has been the only century when it has been possible for a book to appear with the title Tomorrow is Already Here.

An international gateway to information for archivists and archive users

The telephone was first introduced at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 and was an instant success. Although first rented only to "persons of good breeding" and seen as an expensive luxury for doctors and businessmen, the telephone soon transformed American life. Trees gave way to telephone poles as operators known as "hello girls" began to connect a sprawling continent.

Organized by University Librarian Dr. William Stanley Hoole in 1945, the library was named in his honor in October 1977. The library moved from the fourth floor of the Gorgas Library to its current location in 1993.

The history of the transistor begins with the dramatic scientific discoveries of the 1800's--scientists like Maxwell, Hertz, Faraday, and Edison made it possible to harness electricity for human uses. Inventors like Braun, Marconi, Fleming, and DeForest applied this knowledge in the development of useful electrical devices like radio.
Their work set the stage for the Bell Labs scientists whose challenge was to use this knowledge to make practical and useful electronic devices for communications. Teams of Bell Labs scientists, such as Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, and many others met the challenge--and invented the information age. They stood on the shoulders of the great inventors of the 19th century to produce the greatest invention of the our time: the transistor.

Discovered in early nineteen hundreds, radio promissed to be the most influential technology of the twentieth century. Because of the amazing speed, reliability, as well as the relatively low cost of communication, it became widely used by governments and private enterprises all over the world. This paper examines development of radio broadcasting in the United States and the newborn then Soviet Union.

Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts (now part of Boston), on April 27, 1791, and educated at Yale College (now Yale University). He studied painting in London and became a successful portrait painter and sculptor. In 1825 he helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City, and the following year he became the first president of the institution. He continued his painting and became a professor of painting and sculpture at New York University in 1832. About that time he became interested in chemical and electrical experiments and developed apparatus for an electromagnetic telegraph that he completed in 1836.