No. 1451:
INVENTING THE LIBRARY
by John H. Lienhard
Click here for audio of Episode 1451.
Today, we invent the library. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
For you and me, libraries (like
automobiles and telephones) seem to've been there
always. When we celebrate the ancient libraries, it's
the building down the street that's apt to form our
mental picture. Just how much has changed becomes
clearer when I look at the rich account of libraries
in my 1911 and 1970 issues of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
The library of our imagination isn't much older than
automobiles or telephones. I mean that public place
where the books that you and I jointly own are
catalogued and lent out to us. The idea of sharing
our goods that way is, of course, pure socialism, and
it came into being with other forms of socialism,
around 1850.
The free public lending library has actually emerged
from time to time since the 17th century, and those
origins are all distinctly American. The
Massachusetts Bay Company provided a public
collection of books as early as 1629. Salisbury,
Connecticut, created a public reading room for
children in 1803. Perhaps the oldest public library
(in the sense we know it) is the one established in
Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833. Boston formed a
free public library in 1848.
 But New Hampshire was the
first state to establish general funding for public
libraries. They passed the legislation in 1849. The
British Encyclopaedia Britannica makes no
bones about crediting America with this remarkable
institution. And it was clearly part and parcel of
the new movement toward American industrial reform.
It's significant that 1850 was the same year the
first nationwide labor union was formed, and that
it was the printer's union.
So from now on, Americans would read as no other
people ever had. In 1862, Congress passed the
Morrill act. It provided land to every state for
colleges whose prime purpose would be teaching
students agriculture and the mechanical arts. But
they were not to exclude general studies and the
classics. They were, in short, to create an
educated and functional citizenry. Today those
Morrill schools have become major state
universities throughout the land.
The 1911 Britannica was already boasting
that America had ten thousand libraries of a
thousand volumes or more. Today, I could stand in
my own yard and throw a stone that would hit one of
ten private homes with holdings that large. For
we've reaped the fruit of having socialized our
reading. When I did my undergraduate work at Oregon
State, I'd pass a wrought iron fence on the way to
class. The letters OAC were woven into the
ironwork. The old name, Oregon Agricultural
College, had been changed, but the impetus was the
same. I was the beneficiary of a mid-19th-century
decision that we rank and file Americans would read
and be educated. And at the core of that decision
was the remarkable idea that you and I would
jointly own books.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
See the 1911 and 1970 Encyclopaedia Britannica
entries under libraries.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1999 by John H.
Lienhard.
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