Two wealthy and powerful men engage in a decades-long contest to create and possess the most remarkable watch in history. James Ward Packard of Warren, Ohio, was an entrepreneur and a talented engineer of infinite curiosity, a self-made man who earned millions from his inventions, including the design and manufacture of America’s first luxury car—the elegant and storied Packard. Henry Graves, Jr., was the very essence of blue-blooded refinement in the early 1900s: son of a Wall Street financier, a central figure in New York high society, and a connoisseur of beautiful things—especially fine watches. Then, as now, expensive watches were the ultimate sign of luxury and wealth, but in the early twentieth century the limitless ambition, wealth, and creativity of these two men pushed the boundaries of mathematics, astronomy, craftsmanship, technology, and physics to create ever more ingenious timepieces. In any watch, features beyond the display of hours, minutes, and seconds are known as “complications.” Packard and Graves spurred acclaimed Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe to create the Mona Lisa of timepieces—a fabled watch that incorporated twenty-four complications and took nearly eight years to design and build. For the period, it was the most complicated watch ever created. For years it disappeared, but then it surfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in 1999, touching off a heated bidding war, shattering all known records when it fetched $11 million from an anonymous bidder. New York Times bestselling author Stacy Perman takes us from the clubby world of New York high society into the ateliers of the greatest Swiss watchmakers, and into the high-octane, often secretive subculture of modern-day watch collecting. With meticulous research, vivid historical details, and a wealth of dynamic personalities, A Grand Complication is the fascinating story of the thrilling duel between two of the most intriguing men of the early twentieth century. Above all, it is a sweeping chronicle of innovation, the desire for beauty, and the lengths people will go to possess it.

The Peale-Sellers Family Collection, held at the APS Library, is the world’s largest archival collection related to the Peales. Two recent American Philosophical Society Museum exhibitions, Curious Revolutionaries and Conservation and the Peale-Sellers Family Collection, included selected items from the collection. The conservation staff reviewed the selected items to ensure that they were stable enough to display for months without fading, discoloring, or suffering physical damage. When books or manuscripts could not be exhibited without conservation treatment, conservators repaired or stabilized them. Conservation of natural specimens and cultural artifacts is essential today, as it was for Charles Willson Peale when he opened his museum in Philosophical Hall. Renée Wolcott tells readers in her introduction, “As the owner of the nation’s first natural history museum, Charles Willson Peale served as both curator and conservator, concerned with selecting specimens for exhibition and preserving them for future museum visitors. He was also his own archivist, saving letters, diaries, and museum records that passed through his family for generations before becoming enshrined in the APS Library. This book examines the materials Peale and his family have left us, considers their preservation challenges, and discusses the evolution of conservation care for archival collections. Case studies of conservation treatment for six historic Peale-related artifacts illustrate some of the ways in which today’s conservators preserve the materials of the past for the sake of the future."--back cover.

Awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology, this book offers a comparative history of the evolution of modern electric power systems. It described large-scale technological change and demonstrates that technology cannot be understood unless placed in a cultural context.

A woman from Scotland recounts her travels in the U.S., focusing particularly issues relating to women (education, employment, etc.), also discussing more general cultural matters.