Bern Dibner

History of science career

In addition to electrical engineering, Dibner studied the history of technology beginning in the 1930s. He was an avid collector of original scientific works and of books on the history of science, as well as thousands of portraits of various scientists. Bern Dibner also wrote a great number of books on the history of science, such as the history of science bibliography Heralds of Science in 1955 and the history of the transatlantic telegraph cable in The Atlantic Cable in 1959.

Dibner was particularly fascinated by the combination of art and technology in the work of Leonardo da Vinci. He assembled a library of works about da Vinci which grew over the years as Dibner's interests expanded into the history of electricity, the history of Renaissance technology, and finally the history of science and technology in general.

In 1976 he was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society, and in 1983 he was honored with the Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting, "Private Collecting for the Public Good," by the University of San Francisco Gleeson Library and the Gleeson Library Associates.

Burndy Library

In 1941 Dibner formally established the Burndy Library as a separate institution "to advance scholarship in the history of science." By 1964, the Burndy Library collection totaled over 25,000 volumes and Dibner opened a new building in Norwalk, Connecticut, to house the Library.

After his death, the Burndy Library moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1992, where it became the research library for the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In November 2006, the complete Burndy Library collection, by then consisting of 67,000 rare volumes and a collection of scientific instruments, was donated to and became part of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where it is available to scholars. The Huntington Library has offered a Dibner History of Science Program to fund fellowships, a lecture series and annual conference.

Smithsonian Dibner Library

In 1974, Dibner donated one-quarter of the Burndy Library's holdings to the Smithsonian Institution to form the nucleus of a research library in the history of science and technology. In 1976, the Smithsonian established the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, providing the Smithsonian Institution Libraries with its first rare book collection, containing many of the major works dating from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in the history of science and technology including engineering, transportation, chemistry, mathematics, physics, electricity and astronomy. It was initially located in the National Museum of History and Technology, which has since been renamed.

The Library, then numbering 35,000 volumes, was reopened after construction in spring 2010 in the National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington DC. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries catalogued the books and manuscripts of the Dibner Library and entered the records into the international database OCLC and the Smithsonian's online catalog SIRIS.