There was a time in the late 19th century when it was seen that Thomas Edison could do just about anything--so much so that the Brits in The London Punch gave him tongue-in-cheek credit for inventing ...

Welcome! This blog started in January 2008 as a history of science blog that related to my bookstore, but within the first two months the content spilled over into all sorts of unexpected areas, and I ...

[Source: via Chronicles of America series at the Library of Congress, here, and first seen via the interesting Pinterest collection of Trevor Owens, here.] Some five years after Percy Lowell filed his ...

This beauty appears in the pages of Scientific American for 1896, and discusses a proposal for a bridge to connect Manhattan to Jersey, and to do so spectacularly. The plan was for the bridge to be ...

Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739) was an extraordinary mathematical talent—he was also blind (from about the age of one), and invented, principally for his own uses, what I think is the first ...

This short notice of work-under-way, "Seeing by Telegraphy" by William.Edward Ayrton (1847-1908, electrical engineer, F.R.S., and electrical infrastructure pioneer of Japan and India) and John Perry ...

Nicolas de Larmessin (1640-1725) was an enormously creative and productive artist, and in his way created a genre similar to the great and ancient Dance of Death/.Danse Macabre/Totentanz--though his ...

My favorite mid-century illustrator–G.H. Davis of the Illustrated London News–has provided yet another remarkably clear and well-designed series of images on a difficult topic for a main-line popular ...

At first glance this detailed and dense map looks foreboding and somehow off-putting--at least for me, and that was before I understood what the numbers represented. The blue numbers on this section ...

I was drawn (like a moth to a ...) to these images that appeared in the journal Popular Science (New York), 1874, in an article by W.F. Barrett entitled “Sensitive Flames”. Actually I was more drawn ...

This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American ...

There have been some fits and starts in dedicating an effort to posting some examples of German book illustration from the period between-the-wars. There have been just a few thus far on this blog, ...