Monthly Archives: October 2017

On This Day

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Our series highlighting a digital collection or item relevant to this day in history, by Monica Erives, Edward Connery Lathem ’51 Digital Library Fellow.

Sixth Earl of Dartmouth arriving in Hanover on Oct. 25, 1904. Main street in background.

On this day in 1904, the Sixth Earl of Dartmouth arrived on the Dartmouth campus. Dartmouth College was named after the Second Earl of Dartmouth for his important early support of the college, contributing the initial £50 for the establishment of the school and helping obtain another £200 gift from the king. Since then the college community has witnessed the occasional Earl of Dartmouth visit. Most recently, the Tenth Earl of Dartmouth in 2009.

College Hall (Collis) crowd at the time of the Sixth Earl of Dartmouth’s visit.

View more images depicting Dartmouth’s early history and connections across the sea in the Photo Files collection.

Dartmouth, Earls of 1st and 2nd

Dartmouth, Earls of 3rd through 9th

Image of the Week

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Our series examining an Image of the Week from the photographic files, by Kevin Warstadt, Digital Program Specialist.

Dartmouth’s solar car ca. 1989

This image of the week comes from a folder titled “Solar Car.” Dartmouth’s solar powered car raced in the The American Tour de Sol, based on the Swiss race of the same name, in 1989. Also represented in the race were MIT, the New Hampshire Technical Institute, and two independent teams. The race ran from Montpelier to Cambridge.

The history of solar power goes back further than one would expect. In 1839 Edmond Becquerel created the first photovoltaic cell, which operated on the same basic principles as the modern solar cell. In the late nineteenth century, Aleksandr Stoletov is credited with inventing the first solar cell. Bell Labs began producing solar cells for use in space travel in the 1950s, and invented the first practical silicon solar cell later that decade.

See more images of the solar car in the Dartmouth photographic files.

 

Sources

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/05/25/Solar-car-race-a-journey-into-future/7697612072000/
http://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/05/29/Checkered-flag-for-solar-car-race/7599612417600/

Pre-1600 Manuscript Project

Aside

The Digital Production Unit has begun imaging manuscript leaves from Rauner Special Collections in support the work of “manuscriptlink,” a digital humanities project based at the University of South Carolina. We are digitizing all of our pre-1600 manuscript leaves from broken manuscript books. The project is seeking to rebuild the broken manuscripts books from their widely disbursed parts to enhance their research value to the scholarly community. The international collaboration seeks to recover a “lost” medieval library by gathering, aggregating, and describing the dispersed components of dismembered manuscripts, and by presenting digital images of them as virtual codices in a robust interactive online forum.

Many of these manuscripts can be viewed as part of Rauner’s Script to Pixels Collection.