The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology

The Dibner Library traces its roots back to Bern Dibner (1897-1988), an electrical engineer, book collector, and philanthropist. Born in the country now known as Ukraine, Dibner immigrated to the United States in 1904 and settled with his family in New York City. He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1921 and embarked on a career in electrical engineering which led to his patenting a number of inventions and his founding of the Burndy Engineering Company in 1924.
Dibner, who was fascinated by both art and technology, found great pleasure in studying Leonardo da Vinci. This interest led him to obtain a small library (eventually called the Burndy Library) of works about da Vinci which grew over the years as Dibner's interests expanded into the history of electricity, the history of Renaissance technology, and finally the history of science & technology in general. His collection continued to grow, and in 1941 he formally set up the Burndy Library as a separate institution "to advance scholarship in the history of science." By 1964, Dibner's collection totaled over forty thousand volumes and he opened a new building in Norwalk, Connecticut, to house the library more appropriately.
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The Dibner Library is the Smithsonian’s collection of rare books and manuscripts relating to the history of science and technology. Contained in this world-class collection of 35,000 rare books and 2,000 manuscript groups are many of the most important works dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries in the history of science and technology including engineering, transportation, chemistry, mathematics, physics, electricity, and astronomy. The Dibner Library shares this collection with the public through exhibitions in an adjacent gallery, through loans to other institutions’ exhibits, and through public programs.

http://www.sil.si.edu/libraries/Dibner/programs.cfm