Consumer Technology

This site focuses on materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the archive are numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day. Though the names and places have been removed from personal files, researchers will find scholarly articles written by historians of science and biologists who write histories in the field. The site includes articles about the social origins of eugenics, popularization, eugenics laws, and research methods. Each article includes images of primary documents and instruments with explanatory notes. The site also provides a bibliography and a large image archive that can be searched by topic and key word. The text and titles of images are also searchable.

Automotive Industries magazine prepared this illustrated history of automotive technology in 1995 to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The site presents significant events, technological developments, and advertisements from 1895 to 1995 in ten-year increments. The more than 150 images include technical drawings, advertisements, and magazine covers, as well as photographs of vehicles, important designers, and auto plant strikes. Each image accompanies a 30- to 50-word description on developments and on Automotive Industries reportage of the past. A timeline in each section notes significant events in automotive history. Subsidiary pages are not linked, so visitors must return to the home page to visit another time period. The site is entertaining but not analytical.

The website of Europe's "Museum of the Year" has a wealth of information about the history of railways and locomotion. In addition to physical archives that include over 100 engines, and thousands of train related items, the National Railway Museum also has an archive. The Archive is one of Britain's major reference sources for the study of railway history, containing millions of photographs, charts, maps, posters and books. The Photographic archive alone includes 1.4 million prints. Each of the eight collections (from books, to photographs to engineering drawings) provides a web page describing in depth the nature of the collection. Five exhibits provide greater depth to a few of the millions of items in the Museum's collections. These exhibits generally focus on railway photography and art.

In 1876, the United States celebrated its 100th birthday with a Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. This site, presented by The Free Library of Philadelphia and funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, presents more than 1500 digitized images of silver albumen photographs related to the Exhibition. The site is divided into four broad categories. ¨Exhibition Facts" contains a wide variety of statistics and brief (250-word) explanations of aspects like the Fair's organization, attendance, costs to visitors, transportation, food, grounds, and management. This section features photographs of buildings erected by participating foreign nations, images of the Library's Centennial Sheet Music Collection, and various other Fair attractions. Addressing the economic and cultural significance of the Fair, the site provides eight quotes about the Fair from public figures and contemporary writers, as well as a bibliography of more than 150 related scholarly works. A timeline traces the Fair's creation from the 1871 Act of Congress that created the U.S. Centennial Commission to plan the Philadelphia exhibition, to the removal of the exhibits in December 1876. In the Tours section visitors can click on sections of an interactive map of the fair grounds to find details and photographs of buildings and spaces in the Centennial Exhibition. The ¨Centennial Schoolhouse offers activities for students and teachers, including excerpts from a 17-year-old boy's diary about his visit to the Fair, a list of five children's books about the Fair published in 1876, and three newer children's books on the Fair. There are also ideas about how history, art, English, and world language teachers can use the site in their classrooms. Visitors can search the site by keyword or subject. This site is ideal for exploring the nationˆs first Worldˆs Fair and United States cultural history in general.

This site provides links to a few time and calendar exhibits and hosts two exhibits itself. These hosted exhibits, "A Walk Through Time," and "NIST's work measuring time & frequency" are interesting but not particularly deep. The Time and Frequency exhibit provides information about early radio history in the United States as well as information about clock synchronization, the atomic clock and the Global Positioning System. The Walk Through Time exhibit provides a brief synopsis of six periods in history during which the measurement of time evolved from calendars, to sun dials, to mechanical clocks, to internet time synchronization.

Chronologically organized, this site offers a timeline of advances in sound recording and delivery systems with hyperlinks to capsules with more detailed accounts of selected innovations. The site also contains a bibliography and links to other online resources.

The time-warp project is an attempt to archive the rapid advance in technology through the decades. The project's goal is to help preserve information about technology and make it accessible for future generations. The time-warp archive categories are: Calculating Machines, Radio, Audio Equipment, Recorded Media, TV, Toys, Photography, Bibliotech, Computers, Gadget and Gizmos, Telephones, Clocks. Exhibits of various technologies can be browsed chronologically or through a search, making this a user-friendly site. Exhibits usually include a few images and a very brief description.

The Humbul Humanities Hub is a service that collects and evaluates humanities websites in order to assist scholars in using these resources. Its History and Philosophy of Science category includes almost 1000 sites divided into six subgroups: projects/organizations, primary sources, secondary sources, research related, teaching and learning, and bibliographic sources. The sites can also be sorted by period and by target audience. Humbul is also searchable for more specific queries.