Chronographics at Princeton

I was lucky enough to be in the States last week with enough time to go to the Rare Books collection at the library of Princeton. They have a very rare example of an early timeline - in fact it may be unique. It was created in 1753 by a Frenchman, Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg.  I'm very grateful to Stephen Ferguson, curator of Rare Books, and other staff who helped me at the Library.

Outside the Firestone Library at Princeton, August 2009

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The timeline is special for two reasons. It may be the first to use a constant numerical scale for an entire historical period - and that's a lot, because it starts with the beginning of time (God, Adam etc.) and extends right through to Barbeu Du Bourg's own day. And it is interactive - slightly. Du Bourg's timeline is built into a very simple wooden machine with two crank handles so that you can move time back and forth.

I hope to organise material about this and related topics in a Chronographics blog, but for now here is a link to my translation of Diderot's article* from the Enyclopedie which describes the machine.

* Diderot, Denis. "Chronological (machine)." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2009. Trans. of "Chronologique (machine.)," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 3. Paris, 1753.  http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.081 (accessed 14 August 2009).