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December 11, 2007, 11:10 AM ET
19th-Century Science Online
X-rays were first detected in 1896, and the electron was discovered in 1897. The papers describing those scientific breakthroughs appeared in the journal Nature, and they have remained on paper until today.
Now they are online, as the journal unveils a digital archive of its first 80 years, from 1869 to 1949. (Issues since then are already available online.)
Some of the early material, from the 1880s, reads little like the jargon-filled scientific papers of today: Alexander Graham Bell rather informally describes the accents of deaf-mutes who had been taught to speak, and the photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge laments the frequency of ties in horse races, suggesting that motion-capture photography could solve the “photo finish” problem. It did.
By the turn of the century, articles took a form closer to the dense scientific papers we now know. In 1908, with a series of diagrams and equations, Alan Archibald Campbell described the theory of TV. The first fossil evidence that humans got their start in Africa was described in 1925, in a formal tone, by Raymond Dart.
The journal has produced a nice online catalog of the researchers’ achievements.
The articles are easily available online, but readers will have to pay for them, either individually or with a site license. That breakthrough is, of course, a 21st-century phenomenon. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Libraries
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