Overview

“[T]hese countless connecting threads, woven into one indissoluble texture, form that ever-enlarging web which is the blended product of the world’s scientific and industrial activity.”

—William Barton Rogers, 1860, Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology

Inspired by an exhibition of 150 objects created by the MIT Museum to mark MIT’s sesquicentennial, this lavishly illustrated volume is a unique collection of visual and written meditations about the making and meaning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The story of MIT is more than a simple tale of a founder’s vision. It is greater than the sum of all the stories that have been or are yet to be told by the hundreds of thousands who have a direct personal connection with the Institute. Yet, with the assistance of the collective intelligence of the MIT community, the Museum was able to capture some of those “countless connecting threads”—from a towering module for the first real-time digital computer to the famous Baker House Piano Drop. Part history, part catalog, part souvenir, Countless Connecting Threads: MIT’s History Revealed through Its Most Evocative Objects invites readers to (re)discover, through some of the Institute’s most evocative objects, the essence of the vast and varied tapestry that is MIT.

About the Author

Deborah G. Douglas is Curator of Science and Technology at the MIT Museum. She was the curator and project director for the MIT 150 Exhibition.

Douglas, Deborah G. Countless Connecting Threads: MIT’s History Revealed through Its Most Evocative Objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.