Books On-Line
The history of
Autodesk and AutoCAD told through contemporary documents,
edited and annotated by Autodesk founder John Walker.
You can read this 900 page book
on-line on the World-Wide Web, or download a
copy to read or print off-line in either
PostScript
or Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
New: Fifth edition (2017) updates to modern Web standards,
typography, and navigation.
The Hacker's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair through Stress and
Poor Nutrition book plus associated computer tools. You can
read the book on-line
on the World-Wide Web, or download a
copy to read or print off-line in either PostScript
or Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
The WWW and Adobe Acrobat versions have hot-links for all table
of contents items, cross-references, and index entries.
A set of Excel spreadsheets which accompany the book (but are
not necessary to use it) is also available
for downloading, and the weight logging and management tools
described in the book are also available for the
Palm Computing Platform.
New: Fourth Edition (2005) improves appearance, accessibility,
and ease of navigation; it strictly complies with the
XHTML 1.0
and
CSS 2.1
standards.
The year is 1930. The stock market had crashed the previous October,
but the impact of that event wasn't at all clear. Even as the golden
age of radio was still building momentum toward creating the first
continental scale shared popular culture, the preeminent vendors of
the one-to-many connectivity technology of the epoch, AM radio, led
their pitch with price. Direct from this distant epoch, here is the
1930 Allied
Radio Catalogue. It starts slowly and somewhat
tediously: the initial pages are obviously the same radio chassis sold
in a variety of different cabinets, but it gets better when we get
into the bits and pieces. There's even a half page devoted to
components for bleeding-edge early adopters experimenting with
mechanical scanning disc television!
King James Version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.
Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy
citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example
the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
<a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Luke.html#10:27>.
The complete
1903 book catalogue
of Frederick J. Drake & Company of Chicago is now available
on-line. This catalogue appears in the back of one of their books
that bears a copyright date of 1903 and some of the books listed in it
are described as New or Latest editions for 1903 through 1905, so I
presume it dates from around then.
Just reading the descriptions of the books immerses you in a world
long gone and largely forgotten, when humour trod on topics
forbidden today, home handymen consulted 560 page two-volume works on
the use of the steel square, and the infatuated would turn to
North's Book of Love Letters for help in winning the
heart of their dearly beloved. Teddy Roosevelt was president of the
45 United States, the Wright brothers were fiddling around with a
curious contraption on a sand dune in North Carolina, and the dollar
was as good as gold: 50 cents would buy you a hardbound book of 200
pages, shipped postpaid to almost anywhere in the civilised world,
which wasn't ashamed to so describe itself.
The pages are presented as JPEG images, scanned at 600 DPI and scaled
to a uniform height of 768 pixels. The quality of the original
printing isn't all that good—the ink blots and occasional
missing letters were there from the start; there is almost no
degradation due to age apart from yellowing of the paper (which isn't
evident in these greyscale images).
Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, original
French-language 1865 edition, fully illustrated. An
English translation
of this book is also available.
A rather poor English translation of Jules Verne's
De la Terre à la Lune, illustrated with
drawings from the original 1865 French edition.
Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune, the original
French-language 1870 edition, fully illustrated.
Peter B. Kyne's classic novelette about a young man whose
“whatever it takes” attitude has inspired and motivated hundreds
of thousands of readers, including this one, for almost a century.
This Web edition, reproducing the 1921 first edition, is in the
public domain.
In this 1913 classic, H. G. Wells
essentially single-handedly invented the modern pastime of
miniature wargaming, providing a (tin soldier) battle-tested
set of rules which makes for exciting, well-balanced, and
unpredictable games that can be played by two or more people
in an afternoon and part of an evening. Interestingly, he
avoids much of the baggage that burdens contemporary
games such as icosahedral dice and indirect fire
calculations, and strictly minimises the rôle of chance,
using nothing fancier than a coin toss, and that only in
rare circumstances. This
Web edition
includes all of the photographs and marginal drawings
from the 1913 first edition.
Here is Wisdom. One of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 19th
century, P.T. Barnum, presents his 20 “Golden Rules for Making
Money” in this pithy, succinct, and witty document penned in
1880. A Web edition and plain ASCII electronic text are
available, both in the public domain.
If your browser supports the Unicode character set and a
font which includes Hebrew characters, here is a complete
Hebrew Bible you can read in your browser. The text is
the Koren Tanach and is presented without vowels or
diacritical marks. An
earlier edition,
encoded in the ISO 8859-8 character set, remains available.
The text of the two editions is identical.
No mule to feed.
No hands to pay.
You're farming now,
the modern way:
with dynamite!
This 1910 du Pont pamphlet (scanned from an original
edition in the Fourmilab library) introduces farmers to the
labour-saving wonders of that modern agricultural
miracle, “Red
Cross” Dynamite.
When you were a kid, did your grandfather ever pull a coin from his
pocket, clap his hands together and make it disappear, then
“find” it behind your ear, sending you off to the Popsicle
truck for a summer evening treat? If so, and you're now grandparent
age yourself, this may be the book from which he learned that trick.
Alexander Herrmann was a prominent stage magician in the latter half
of the nineteenth century. In this 1903 book, he reveals many of the
secrets of the conjuror, from the fundamental sleight of hand skills
of palming objects and vanishing and producing them, to the operation
of famous illusions such as the disembodied head which speaks. This
on-line edition, available
both in HTML and Plain ASCII formats, is a complete reproduction of the
book, including (in the HTML edition) all the illustrations.
Lewis Carroll's classic poem from Through the Looking-Glass, 1871.
Written between 1899 and 1919, Rudyard Kipling's classic poems,
“The Gods of the Copybook Headings”,
“The Old Issue”,
and
“The White Man's Burden”
evoke thoughts of eternal verities, the temptations and risks of
empire, and the endless struggle for individual freedom against
encroaching tyranny which are as relevant today as when they first
appeared in print. These on-line editions are strictly compliant
XHTML 1.0 and in the public domain—you may use them in any
way you wish.
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a revolutionary before leaving his
native Russia, but it was in the Jura mountains of western
Switzerland, present-day home to Fourmilab, that he developed his
philosophy of anarchism. In his
Memoirs, he wrote,
“…when I came away from the mountains after a week's
stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I
was an anarchist.”
His 1887 pamphlet,
Anarchist
Communism, is one of the clearest expositions of
Kropotkin's view that anarchism cannot seek solely to do away
with government, but must also abolish property and privilege.
In Anarchist
Morality, published in 1897, he treats
morality as a characteristic of all living beings and argues that
anarchism, oft condemned as immoral, is in fact entirely consistent
with this innate morality.
Jules Verne's Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, the original
French-language 1873 edition, fully illustrated.
Lysander Spooner's No Treason: The
Constitution of No Authority.
Written in 1870 and
published by the author, No Treason remains one of the
greatest flat-out anarcho-libertarian rants ever penned.
Published in 1921 to introduce African children to the variety of
peoples and cultures of their continent, People of
Africa by Edith A. How, a missionary in Central Africa,
provides modern readers insight into how Europeans regarded the
Dark Continent at the apogee of the colonial era. The book is
available as an illustrated Web edition and in a variety of
other forms suitable for reading off-line.
An English language translation of Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which introduced
Special Relativity, as published in the 1923 book
The Principle of Relativity.
This document is
is both a monument of twentieth century physics and
a masterpiece of scientific communication. In addition to
the Web edition,
a ready-to-print
PostScript
file and
LaTeX source code
of this document may be downloaded.
Stefano Taschini
has produced a beautiful Adobe Acrobat
PDF edition
of this document--thank you!
An English language translation of Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which
first derived the equivalence of mass and energy,
as published in the 1923 book
The Principle of Relativity.
Starting solely from the principle of relativity for
observers in uniform motion and the constancy of the
speed of light, Einstein employs an elegant kinematical
argument to deduce the most famous equation of twentieth
century physics: the equivalence of mass and energy.
In addition to
the Web edition,
ready-to-print
PostScript
and Adobe Acrobat PDF
files as well as
LaTeX source code
of this document are available.
Albert Einstein is often thought of as an archetype of the unworldly theoretical
physicist, but in fact he was interested in and knowledgeable on a broad variety
of topics far removed from his speciality. In 1930, along with fellow
physicist Leo Szilard, he was granted U.S. Patent 1,781,541 for a refrigerator
with no moving parts other than the refrigerant. At the time the patent was issued,
Einstein and Szilard were residents of Berlin; both were soon to flee Germany when
Hitler came to power. This document is a facsimile of the U.S. patent on the
Einstein-Szilard refrigerator, filed on December 16, 1927, granted
November 11, 1930, and licensed to the Electrolux Corporation.
In 1955 the giant mushrooms sprouted in abundance at the Nevada Test
Site north of Las Vegas. A total of fourteen fission devices were
detonated, with yields as high as 43 kilotons. The “Desert Rock VI”
exercise exposed 8000 troops to nuclear blasts to train them
for combat operations on the nuclear battlefield. This document was
distributed in January 1955 to those living near the Nevada Test Site
to prepare them for the 1955 test series. Illustrated with
delightful 1950s line art, it includes such sage advice as, “Your
best action is not to be worried about fall-out.” and
“We can expect many reports that ‘Geiger counters were going crazy
here today.’ Reports like this may worry people unnecessarily.
Don't let them bother you.”
The 1977 third (and most recent) edition of this book, compiled by
Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan and published by the
United States Department of Defense and Energy Research and
Development Administration (now Department of Energy) is the
definitive work on nuclear weapons effects. It is presented in a
hybrid form, with an XHTML table of contents which links
to PDF file containing scans of the pages of the book. An
interactive Web edition of the
nuclear bomb effects computer
circular slide rule which accompanied the 1962 edition of
the book is also available.
There's nothing better to fill those odd moments of
downtime…standing in line at the post office or
supermarket check-out, waiting in the dentist's
office for your name to be (gulp) called, whiling
away that seemingly endless interval between
blinding flash and deafening
report…than whipping
out your PDA (PalmPilot, PocketPC, etc.) for a little
light reading. Aleatory occasions for literary
indulgence of unpredictable temporal extent demand works
which don't require a great deal of concentration nor a
long attention span; early 20th century juvenile pulp
fiction fills the bill superbly. I've been reading through
the original Tom Swift novels written by
Victor Appleton between 1910 and 1941 on my PDA; here's
a library so you can do likewise, should you wish. These
books are based upon the Project
Gutenberg Etext editions, but reformatted for reading on a
handheld computer with
eReader
or any of its predecessors. HTML, PDF, and plain ASCII editions
suitable for reading online or printing are also available.
The modest collection of titles will grow slowly and sporadically
as I work my way through the series.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Saint Jerome's A.D. 405 Latin translation of the Bible.
Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy
citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example
the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
<a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Vulgate/Luke.html#10:27>.
H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, available online as an
HTML document tree, or to download in various formats, allowing you
to read the book when not connected to the Internet or when trapped
in a closed timelike loop in which the Internet has not been
invented.
H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
C++ program which automatically translates electronic texts
prepared in the format used at this site into LaTeX for typeset
output, HTML for Web publication, Palm Markup Language for
handhelds, or 7-bit ASCII for readers unable to display 8-bit
ISO characters. Includes tools for editors to produce and
validate electronic books.
ISBNquest processes International Standard Book Numbers
(ISBNs) with a Web-based interface and validates, interconverts
formats, inserts proper punctuation, analyses the components of
an ISBN, generates a bar code, and looks up the publication on
Amazon, showing title, author, publisher, publication date, and
other information. A link is composed which credits purchases
made through it to an Amazon Associates account.
Inspired by Donald E. Knuth's
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated,
The Stratified Bible generates custom “stratified
samples“ of books of the Bible, for either user-specified or
randomly selected chapter and verse numbers. Verse text is displayed
in English, Latin, and Hebrew (the latter only for Old Testament
books), with text linked to the verse in context in the complete book.
Custom queries can select which languages are displayed and from what
portions of the Bible (for example, the Torah or Gospels) verses are
sampled.