Bern Dibner

Bern Dibner
Bern Dibner
Born	18 August 1897 Kiev, Ukraine
Died	6 January 1988 Wilton, Connecticut
Education	Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn

Bern Dibner (1897 – 1988) was an electrical engineer, industrialist, and historian of science and technology.

Dibner was born near Kiev, Ukraine in 1897. He moved to the United States with his family at the age of 7. In 1921, he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Soon after graduating, he designed and patented the first solderless electrical connectors and founded the Burndy Engineering Company in 1924. The company later became the Burndy Corporation and was bought by the French corporation Framatome Connectors International (FCI) in 1988.^[1] In 2009, Burndy was acquired and became a subsidiary of Hubbell Incorporated.^[2] Dibner died at his home in Wilton, Connecticut on January 6, 1988.^[3]

In addition to electrical engineering, Dibner studied the history of technology. 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 Atlantic Cable in 1955.^[4] In 1976 he was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society.

Dibner, who was fascinated by both art and technology, found great pleasure in studying Leonardo da Vinci. This interest led him to obtain a small 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. His collection continued to grow, and in 1941 he formally set up the Burndy Library as a separate institution "to advance scholarship in the history of science." By 1964, the Burndy Library collection totaled over 40,000 volumes and Dibner opened a new building in Norwalk, Connecticut, to house the Library.

In 1974, Bern Dibner donated one-quarter of the Burndy Library's then holdings to the Smithsonian Institution to form the nucleus of a research library in the history of science and technology, to be located in the decade-old National Museum of History and Technology (now called The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center). In 1976, the Smithsonian's Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology was established, 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. The Dibner Library, now numbering 35,000 volumes, was reopened after construction in spring 2010, and is located in the National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington DC.^[5] The Smithsonian Institution Libraries have cataloged the books and manuscripts of the Dibner Library and entered the records into the international database OCLC and the Smithsonian's own online catalog, SIRIS.^[6]

After Bern Dibner's death in 1988, 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 now offers a Dibner History of Science Program to fund fellowships, a lecture series and annual conference.^[7]

The "Burndy" appellation, used for both his company and library, was invented by Dibner himself and represents a portmanteau or blend of his first and last names.^{[citation needed]}

Works

• Leonardo da Vinci, Military Engineer (1946)
• Doctor William Gilbert (1947)
• Faraday Discloses Electro-magnetic Induction (1949)
• Moving the Obelisks (1950)
• Galvani-Volta, A Controversy that led to the Discovery of Useful Electricity (1952)
• Ten Founding Fathers of the Electrical Science (1954)
• Heralds of Science (1955)
• Early Electrical Machines (1957)
• Agricola on Metals (1958)
• The Atlantic Cable (1959)
• Darwin of the Beagle (1960)
• Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism (1961)
• The Victoria and the Triton (1962)
• The New Rays of Prof. Röntgen (1963)
• Alessandro Volta and the Electric Battery (1964)
• Röntgen and the Discovery of X-rays (1968)
• Luigi Galvani (1971)

See also

• Burndy Engineering Company
• Burndy Library
• Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology
• Electrical Connector

References

External links

• Biography of Bern Dibner at MIT
• Biography of Bern Dibner at American Scientist
• The Dibner Library Portrait Collection online at the Smithsonian Institution

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 29661946 LCCN: n80015691 GND: 123954541 BNF: cb12894615b

Persondata
Name	Dibner, Bern
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	18 August 1897
Place of birth	Kiev, Ukraine
Date of death	6 January 1988
Place of death	Wilton, Connecticut