NYU Poly Archives Portrait Collection, https://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/4f4qrnxk
The history of technology lost a good friend and significant benefactor on 28 September 2005, when David Dibner succumbed to a sudden and unexpected heart attack. He was seventy-eight years old. An engineer and businessman, David had headed the Dibner Fund and the Burndy Library since 1989 and supported the Dibner Institute from its creation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 until his death. With his wife Frances, also a board member of the Dibner Fund, David promoted a wide range of philanthropic interests, nurtured his own fascination with the artifacts of modern technology, and added significantly to the rare books, manuscripts, incunabula, and objects collected in the Burndy Library, more than doubling the number of volumes in the collection.
In many of these activities, David stewarded the legacy of his father, Bern Dibner. Born in 1897 in what is now Ukraine, Bern Dibner emigrated with his family to the United States, settled in New York City, and graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1921 with a degree in electrical engineering. He founded the Burndy Engineering Company (later Burndy Corporation) in 1924 to manufacture electrical connectors. The success of the company, based in large measure on Bern’s twenty-four patents, allowed him to launch his philanthropic enterprise and indulge a lifelong fascination with the history of science and technology. He founded the Dibner Fund in 1957 as a private family foundation to support the history of science and a wide range of other programs, ranging from preservation of the environment to humanitarian relief and the promotion of peace and tolerance. Bern Dibner took a sabbatical from his company to study Renaissance science in Zurich, published more than thirty books and articles in the history of science and technology, and acquired a personal library that grew in size to require its own building adjacent to the Burndy Corporation headquarters in Wilton, Connecticut, near which the History of Science Society held its annual meeting in both 1974 and 1983. In 1974, he contributed one-quarter of his book collection to the Smithsonian Institution to form the core of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, which is now part of the National Museum of American History, Behring Center. Before his death in 1988, Bern Dibner conceived an institute that might fulfill the vision of George Sarton for a Baconian program to support the study of the history of science.
David Dibner realized his father’s vision. Following service in World War II, David studied engineering at Columbia University and continued postgraduate study at the London School of Economics. Later, he attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard University. Joining the Burndy Corporation in 1952 as an engineer, David worked his way up through the organization to succeed his father as chairman of the board, also assuming the presidency of the Dibner Fund and Burndy Library in 1989. In these latter roles, he devoted himself to continuing his father’s legacy and realizing his dream for an institute devoted to the history of science and technology.
The Dibner Fund called for a consortium of schools to be formed in the Boston-Cambridge area of Massachusetts, one among them to serve as the home for the Burndy Library and a new institute for the promotion of the history of science and technology. In due course, MIT was chosen and plans were made to renovate a building overlooking the Charles River at 38 Memorial Drive. A state-of-the-art library was built on its ground floor to preserve and display the Burndy Collection, and rooms were fitted out on the second and third floors to provide offices and public spaces for staff and fellows of the newly created Dibner Institute. The library and institute opened in 1992, accepting the first of more than 340 fellows who would study there over the ensuing years.
David oversaw this activity with his accustomed graciousness and strength of purpose. He sought out and embraced good advice. He surrounded himself with competent people at the Dibner Fund, Dibner Institute, and Burndy Library. He remained ever mindful of his father’s wishes, adapting them always to the evolving state of practice in the history of science and technology. He and Frances drove often from their Connecticut home to negotiate with MIT, oversee the design and renovation of the building at 38 Memorial Drive, select the staff, and participate in the activities of the new institute and library. Most of the institute’s fellows had more than one opportunity to be charmed by David’s welcoming smile, generous persona, conscientious engagement in the activities of the institute and its fellows, and genuine delight in the advancement of the history of science and technology. Though he harbored his own tastes and preferences in the history of science and technology, he relished the great diversity of scholarship conducted by the fellows and supported by the library.
Like his father before him, David brought an engineer’s eye and interest to the study of technology. He was a materialist, fascinated by the workings of machines and the minds of the men and women who invented and produced them. In his travels around the world and across the United States, he sought out, and often supported, museums that collected the rich heritage of modern engineering practice and scientific experiment. When the Society for the History of Technology met in London in 1996, David sponsored a visit to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, which he particularly admired because of its many working engines and the tutorials given by its knowledgeable staff. David literally marveled at the human genius embodied in these machines. He and Frances endowed the Frances and David Dibner Professorship of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT as a way of supporting the history of technology that fascinated them most. David Mindell currently holds this chair.
But David Dibner was far more than an antiquarian buff. He reveled in the range and diversity of scholarly genres, methodologies, and topics studied at the Dibner Institute and frequented the lectures, seminars, and conferences conducted there. He gave the institute’s directors and staff free rein to seek out and support the best scholars from around the world. Always hopeful that the scholars attracted to the institute would avail themselves of the riches of the Burndy Library, he nevertheless refused to make that a condition for granting fellowships. Instead, he strove to expand and refine the library’s collection so as to lure by its riches. Like his father before him and sons after him, he always believed that the Burndy Library was the core activity of the Dibner Fund’s support of the history of science and technology.
David was also a friend and counselor to SHOT. More than once, officers and representatives of the society solicited David and the Dibner Fund for general institutional support and for special projects. In every case he listened carefully to the society’s requests and generously proffered his advice and his resources, often both. Occasionally he declined to support the society’s proposals, but he always had a good reason and explained why. SHOT’s officers and representatives were never left empty-handed when they sought the help of the Dibner Fund.
When David learned in 2004 that MIT would not renew its affiliation agreement with the Dibner Institute and Burndy Library, he committed himself to finding a new home for the Burndy Library and a new model for the Dibner Institute. Following a nationwide search and extensive deliberations, David was able to consummate an agreement with the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California (site of SHOT’s 1997 meeting) that will provide a permanent home for the collection and a site tor continuing activities in support of the history of science and technology. When I last spoke with David, shortly before his untimely death, he was happy, optimistic, enthusiastic, and busy with plans to over see his father’s legacy transferred to its new home in California. He knew that he had stewarded the Dibner Fund and its special relationship with the history of science and technology as his father would have wished. And he would be passing it on in good order to his sons. All of us involved in the history of technology have reason to be grateful for that superb stewardship, and ample reason as well to miss David’s warm, supportive, and enthusiastic friendship.
Alex Roland
Originally published as Alex Roland, “David Dibner, 1927–2005,” Technology and Culture 47, no. 2 (2006): 472–75. 10.1353/tech.2006.0149.
The Burndy Library has moved to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. The Dibner Institute, formerly on the MIT campus, is now closed. Information regarding the Burndy Library and Dibner Fellowships may now be found at http://huntington.org/burndy.htm. (Some information about its collections can be found here: Burndy Library | Dibner Institute.)