A.C.
Gilbert was a man of many talents. Born in 1884, he would go
on
to become a world champion pole vaulter and a graduate of Yale
Medical School. In fact, Gilbert worked his way through
medical school by
performing as a magician, and after graduation, he opted not to
practice medicine, but instead began inventing and marketing toys, the
first being magic sets.
Gilbert is probably best known for his
invention of the erector set, but over the years he marketed a very
popular line of toy trains and science sets. Around 1920,
Gilbert
produced several science sets centered around science and engineering.
Thanks to
Google Books and
The Internet
Archive, the manuals for at least three of these sets are
available and in the public domain today.
The
manualsfor the "Light Experiments," "Signal Engineering," and
"Hydraulic and Pneumatic Engineering" sets may be found on these sites
in PDF or DjVu format. In addition,
The Science Notebook
has reproduced the manuals in HTML format on this site for your reading
pleasure.
These
books were copyrighted in 1920, so some of the material is very dated.
These sets were unabashedly targeted at boys, as most people
of
the day assumed that girls would not pursue careers in science or
engineering. In addition, with America troops having recenly
returned from "The Great War" (World War I), much of the practical
application was on things military. Also, while many
of the
experiments and activitied in these books are still being done
in schools, a few of the experiments would not be
considered particularly safe today, so if you try anything in them,
please understand that you do so at your own risk.
Regardless, these are being provided "as is."See our
Terms of Use.
These
manuals are broken down into chunks of approximately 25 pages to make
them reasonable to load. The oroginal page numbers were
preserved, and the original illustrations were used. They
contain
a fair amount of graphics, so please be patient while they load.
Finally, there may be some typos due to the fact that the
original
text files did contain some significant errors. Hopefully,
most
have been caught, but if you discover any errors, please let us know,
and we'll try to fix them.
The
Science Notebook