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Welcome to the FEM Eyewitness site
The Eyewitness Project is an on-line catalyst, funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. On these pages, we have poked at a few points and are standing back to listen to those who have made it happen. On-line gathering of information offers unprecedented opportunities for sharing and disseminating information. Part of our task is making the interaction easy for participants. The other part is encouraging the stories and reminiscences and, hopefully, identifying and locating significant records and reports, which demonstrate the evolution of specific areas of technology.

The use of digital encoding in telecommunications and the other advances in DSP (digital signal processing), such as in speech synthesis, led to the use of DSP in recording. In 1972 Nippon Columbia began to digitally master recordings, and in the same year the BBC began using pulse code modulation for high-quality sound distribution in radio and television and in its studios began using an 8-track digital audio recorder with error correction. By 1975, it was demonstrated that DSP could improve old recordings (in the first case, by engineer Tom Stockham, historical recordings of Enrico Caruso), and digital audio tapes began to be widely adopted by audio engineers. Music synthesizers incorporating digital recording also began to proliferate. But then the technology took an interesting turn.

ICE seeks to advance the knowledge, practice and business of civil engineering, to promote the breadth and value of the civil engineer's global contribution to sustainable, economic growth, and ethical standards, and to include in membership all those involved in the profession.

In early November of 1965, at the height of the cold war, 30 million people living in the most densely populated region of the United States experienced a cascading power failure which blacked out almost the entire Northeast in less than fifteen minutes. Rising to the occasion, New Yorkers assisted each other in a spirit of cooperation and community uncharacteristic of ordinary city life. Twelve years later, in the summer of 1977, the New York metropolitan region experienced another massive power outage, but this time the popular response was quite different. Devastating riots and looting engulfed the poorer sections of the city, inflicting enormous economic damage at a time when New York City was already on its knees.

WELCOME to the MouseSite, a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.
As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces.

Mechanical devices to achieve speech synthesis were conceived of in the realm of fiction, and first devised in the early 19th century. The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, and the subsequent efforts to reduce the bandwidth requirements of transmitting voice, led back to the idea. In the 1930s, the telephone engineers at Bell Labs developed the famous Voder, a speech synthesizer that was unveiled to the public to great fanfare at the 1939 World’s Fair, but that required a skilled human operator.
Fully automatic speech synthesis came in the early 1960s, with the invention of new automatic coding schemes, such as Adaptive Predictive Coding (APC). With those new techniques in hand, the Bell Labs engineers again turned their attention to speech synthesis. By the late 1960s they had developed a system for internal use in the telephone system, a machine that read wiring instructions to Western Electric telephone wirers, who could then keep eyes and hands on their work. Further progress led to the introduction, in 1976, of the Kurzweil Reading Machine which for the first time allowed the blind to "read" plain text as opposed to Braille. By 1978, the technology was so well established and inexpensive to produce that it could be introduced in a toy, Texas Instruments’ Speak-and-Spell. Thus, the development of this important technology from inception until fruition took about 15 years, involved practitioners from various disciplines, most of whom are still alive, and had a far-reaching impact on other technologies and, through them, society as a whole.

The Historical Library contains a large and unique collection of rare medical books, medical journals to 1920, pamphlets, prints, and photographs, as well as current works on the history of medicine. The library was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over 300 medical incunabula.

The manuscript collection contains 208 sets of papers, ranging in quantity from a few sheets of correspondence to many hundreds of items. Individual scientists represented in the collection include significant figures in CSIRO such as Sir David Rivett, Sir Ian Wark and Dr Lloyd Rees, academics such as Professor Frank Fenner and Sir Ernest Titterton and more than 60 other Fellows of the Academy. The collection is not limited to Fellows, however; the papers of Sir Neil Hamilton Fairley, for example, are heavily used by people interested in malarial research. A number of scientific societies have also chosen the Basser Library as the repository for their archives with the Australian Institute of Physics and the Geological Society of Australia providing the largest collections.

The College is a not-for-profit educational and cultural institution dedicated to examining the medical sciences and their place in society in order to enhance the understanding of medicine and the roles of physicians in history and in contemporary life.

Archives and Special Collections at the Kalmanovitz Library preserves and maintains unique materials to support research and teaching in the history of the health sciences for faculty and students across all campus disciplines.
The Library also maintains a collection of published secondary sources in the history of the health sciences, available on the 5th floor for browsing and circulation