SHOT President: 1971–72 da Vinci Medal: 1974
On January 6, 1988, Bern Dibner, civic leader, philanthropist, and historian of science, passed away quietly at his home in Wilton, Connecticut, at the age of ninety. He was born in the Ukraine, then part of tsarist Russia, on August 18, 1897, and was seven years of age when he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1904—the youngest in a family of eight children. He grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he attended New York public schools and the Hebrew Technical Institute. After serving in World War I, he found employment as an electrician. Receiving a modest cash settlement following a minor industrial accident, he enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute of New York (now Polytechnic University). He graduated cum laude in 1921, with a degree in electrical engineering. Employed as an engineer with an electrical construction company in Schenectady, in 1923 he was assigned the task of unifying the electrical system in Cuba. Because the system consisted of many small power plants, there was urgent need for improved methods for connecting electrical conductors and joining power system substations. Since no such device existed, he proceeded to design a universal connector, requiring neither soldering nor welding, with which it became possible to produce a unified grid. Unable to interest his employers or others in fabricating his design, he proceeded to patent it himself.
In 1924, in partnership with a brother-in-law, he established the Burndy Engineering Company (later the Burndy Corporation). It had its beginnings in a building in the Bronx, where Burndy Engineering began manufacturing and selling electrical connectors to the industry. In time Dibner was granted twenty-four patents and guided the growth of his firm into a worldwide organization that has pioneered in the manufacture of electrical connectors for the utility and electrical construction markets. It is also a major supplier of electronic connectors to the computer, business equipment, and aerospace industries, and to the military. In World War II Dibner attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force and was awarded the Bronze Star with two battle stars while serving in the European theater of operations in 1944–45.
Dibner’s involvement with the history of science and technology began early in the 1930s, when he first became fascinated with the multiple talents and achievements of Leonardo da Vinci that bridged the arts and sciences. He learned Italian in order to study Leonardo and began to collect technical works and books about him. During his trips to Europe he constantly sought literature on the subject. In 1936, taking sabbatical leave from his firm, he matriculated at the University of Zurich to study Renaissance art and science. In 1940 and 1941 he studied the history of science at Columbia University.
By this time his interests had widened to encompass the entire field of the history of science and technology. He began to collect the primary works on the physical and biological sciences, gradually amassing an important collection of manuscripts, incunabula, and printed material on the subject. A specialty of his collection, derived from his training, consisted of works on electricity and magnetism published before 1900.
At first the fast-growing collection was maintained in the company offices in the Bronx, and, after the 1951 move of the corporate headquarters to West Norwalk, Connecticut, in its conference rooms. As time went on, the need for a separate building to make the collection accessible to the public became increasingly apparent. This goal was finally realized with the completion in 1964 of the Burndy Library building near the corporate headquarters. There in 1974 and again in 1983 the History of Science Society held its annual meeting, attended by historians of science from all over the world.
The Burndy Library’s impressive series of monographs, initiated as Christmas offerings for friends and business associates, derived from subject matter in the library’s holdings. These ranged from annotated reprints of rare scientific works to original monographs by notable modern historians. Of the thirty-six works in the series, more than twenty were the works of Dibner himself, the first in 1946 on Leonardo da Vinci, Military Engineer. Nine years later he published a monograph on the Heralds of Science, a landmark work which has since served as an important permanent guide for librarians, historians, and scholars. It lists and describes the 200 source books which Dibner felt were epochal in the history of the physical and biological sciences, books that proclaimed new truths or hypotheses, redirected scientific thought, brought understanding to natural laws, and often introduced technological change. It was these books that had served as the core of the Burndy Library.
Following his retirement as chairman of the Burndy Corporation, Dibner was able to devote more and more of his time to the development of his library, to pursuit of research, and to philanthropic endeavors. At the same time that he was maintaining and developing the Burndy Library, Dibner made many gifts of funds and collections to other institutions of learning. In the 1960s he presented his col- lection of more than 1,000 works about Leonardo to Brandeis University, and in 1981 he made it possible for Brandeis to acquire some 24,000 books and memorabilia from the library of the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra to establish the Vito Volterra Cultural Center.
In 1974 Dibner made a major gift from the holdings of the Burndy Library to the Smithsonian Institution. This extremely important col- lection in the history of science and technology included approximately 1,600 units of manuscripts, 300 incunabula, and 10,000 printed works; featured were the 200 “heralds of science.” It was his gift to the nation in which he and his family had found freedom and achieved success. Identified as the Dibner Library in the Smithsonian Institution’s Special Collections Branch, it is housed in the National Museum of American History (originally the National Museum of History and Technology), where it is used by staff and scholars from all over the world.
In 1983, Dibner and his late wife Barbara established the Bern and Barbara Dibner Associate Professorship of the History of Science at Brandeis University. Culminating Dibner’s many contributions to learned institutions was the founding of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1987, shortly before his death. The institute’s purpose will be to stimulate scholarship in the history of science and technology by means of conferences, colloquia, exchange of scholars, and publications. It is planned as a consortium of five academic institutions: Harvard University, Brandeis University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The inaugural meeting and lecture of the new institute took place at Brandeis on December 6, 1987, just a month before Dibner’s death. Eventually the collections of the Burndy Library will be transferred from Norwalk to Brandeis as part of the new institute.
Although not a founding member of the Society for the History of Technology, Dibner soon became an ardent supporter, making periodic generous contributions. He served as president of the society in 1971–72, and most recently he funded the Dibner Award for Excellence in Exhibits of the History of Technology and Culture. Dibner was the recipient of many honors, including six honorary doctorates, the Eli Whitney Award in 1973, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology in 1974, and the Distinguished Service Award from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1976 he was awarded the James Smithson Gold Medal of the Smithsonian Institution, the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, and the Einstein Award of the Israel Institute of Technology.
Dibner was a member of many learned organizations. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Pierpont Morgan Library, of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and of Brandeis University; Life Trustee of the American Technion Society; a member of the visiting committee of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University; and a trustee of both the University of Bridgeport and of the Yale Medical Library. He was a member of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology and served as chairman of the Electrical Historical Foundation.
Bern Dibner’s seeking mind was always filled with new projects, and was never stilled up to the last day of his life. He will be long remembered as a man of considerable modesty, who shared in the research interests of many, and over the past half-century made numerous contributions to institutions of learning in support of the disciplines of the history of science and the history of technology.
Silvio A. Bedini
Originally published as Silvio A. Bedini, “Bern Dibner (1897–1988),” Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989): 189–93, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0184.
Dibner, Bern. “First Martyr of Electricity.” Technology and Culture17, no. 4 (1976): 743–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891823.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture16, no. 3 (1975): 424–28. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891566.
Dibner, Bern. “Hoover and Agricola.” Technology and Culture13, no. 3 (1972): 417–25. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/893924.
Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The approximately 11,000 volumes of rare books and the 1,600 manuscript groups in science and technology donated by the Burndy Library in 1974 form the core of the Dibner Library’s collection. Over the years the collection has been supplemented by the Smithsonian’s own holdings and gifts from individuals and institutions and now numbers some 35,000 rare books and approximately 2,000 manuscript groups.
Dibner Library Manuscripts This collection includes correspondence, study and laboratory books, notes, diaries, and hand-lettered texts by notable scientists from the 13thto the 20th Authors like Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Nicola Tesla, Albert Einstein and many other significant scientific figures are represented. The manuscripts were carefully selected and originally collected by Bern Dibner and complement his invaluable collection of rare books on the history of science that are now held by the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.
The Dibner Award for Excellence in Exhibits of the History of Technology and Culture was established through the generosity of the late Bern Dibner and the Charles Edison Fund. The purpose of the award is to encourage the production of quality museum exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry, and engineering to the general public.