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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The presumption of this Illustrated London News article ("On the Impulse to Fly Commercially", 18 October 1919) on the growing popularity of commercial flying for business and pleasure was correct, ...

[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 ...

Pound-for-pound, hole-for-whole, this well may be the most beautiful book ever written on holes--it is at the very least one of the most beautiful botanical works ever published, which is saying a lot ...

J.W. Conway launched this missive into the world in 1935--at a time when left-handedness was deemed to be unacceptable and curable--adding his anti-left-handed sentiments to a teetering pile of other ...

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 ...

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing ...

Following yesterday's "Occupational Alphabet" post comes A was an Archer, or a New Amusing Alphabet for Children, published in beautiful Newark, New Jersey, in 1844. 10 centimeters tall, this little ...

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 ...

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 ...