NEXT week, the world鈥檚 first auction of rare manuscripts and artefacts charting the origin of the internet will take place at Christie鈥檚 in New York. That it should have taken more than 30 years after the development of the internet for this to happen speaks volumes about the collectors who specialise in the history of science and technology. They tend to be a conservative bunch who are preoccupied with the world of science in the 19th century and earlier. But science has moved on and I believe the world of collecting must change too.
The library for sale is mine. It draws together important documents from the history of computing, networking and telecommunications. It contains rare books that date as far back as the 17th century, including the first edition of the mathematician John Napier鈥檚 book describing a mechanical way of speeding up the use of logarithms (estimated price $25,000-$30,000). This classic is typical of the manuscripts that many collectors look for: it is old, significant and valuable, all of which help make such items relatively straightforward to spot.
But much of my collection dates from the latter half of the 20th century. A good example is a copy of Vint Cerf and Robert Khan鈥檚 paper describing the protocol used to send information over the internet, which dates from 1974 (estimated price $2000-$3000). It is just one of many hundreds of thousands of technical papers published in the 1970s that are still available today. With so much material to pick from, spotting which of these modern papers is significant, and therefore valuable, may be more difficult than collecting the well-known classics of earlier centuries. Collectors who want to specialise in the modern era must understand today鈥檚 technology and its origins.
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The internet, for example, has its origins in three branches of technology: computing, telecommunications and networking, and my library contains items in all these areas. It started with my purchase in 1998 of a small collection that included rare documents by authors such as Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, and the mathematician John von Neumann, who developed much of the early theory of computing.
This gave me the confidence to build a collection on topics that in my experience had been extremely difficult to collect. I next purchased a collection of rare editions by Charles Babbage, the inventor of the mechanical Analytical Engine, the first programmable computer, and the author of the first computer programs. I went on to buy details of the design and operation of the first commercially available computer in the US, the Universal Automatic Computer or UNIVAC. The documents had been preserved by Ralph Mullendore, an engineer at the US Census Bureau who was in charge of maintaining this famous early machine.
Finally, I bought the papers of John Presper Eckert, an electrical engineer at the University of Pennsylvania who in 1946 co-invented the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. By selling his computers, Eckert became one of the founders of the electronic computer industry. And since he also developed the UNIVAC, his papers merged perfectly with those of Mullendore.
During this time I was also acquiring as many relevant individual items as I could. Because the importance of the internet was clear, I collected documents relating to the development of telegraph networks, which were the earliest data networks, and on the invention of telephone, radio and television, and on the mathematical theories of communication and data communication. In the end, I assembled about 1000 items on topics ranging from the mathematical theory of communication to the origins of bioinformatics.
鈥淭oday, libraries hold more copies of some 15th-century books than certain modern papers鈥�
A number of factors worked in my favour. While computing and the internet are widely recognised as a hugely important technologies, few institutional or private libraries collect artefacts and documents recording their origins. That meant less competition for the documents that did come up.
And copies of these documents are rarer than you might think. They were often issued as technical reports and circulated to only a small number of people, who had a habit of discarding them. Today, fewer copies of some of these documents are preserved in libraries than copies of some 15th-century books. This significantly enhances their value.
I found assembling my library hugely rewarding. From the treasures it contained I have been able to write two books about the birth of the internet. But now I am finished. As a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, I want to sell. With the internet still relatively young but 800 million people already connected, it is hard to imagine a time when interest in the origins of cyberspace will be much greater. What better time to realise my investment?