Christmas came early. With money from Carlyle, I bought a reproduction of Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, a three-tome work from the 1870s which catalogued mechanisms, devices and machinery known at the time. It’s the ultimate nerd read.
You can browse two electronic versions online:
- at UMich; large page images.
- at Princeton Imaging; in DjVu format, this is a little easier to read if you have the right plugin.
I have to say, though, that the dead tree version is a splendid read.