Brinton Ahlin, Panteleymon Anastasakis, Travis Berger, Alex Boden, Jon Franklin, Magnus Sveinn Helgason, Marcus Holmlund, Anniki Laine, Sasha Nichols-Geerdes, and Eugene Pooley provided invaluable research assistance. George Green helped greatly by suggesting some of his best undergraduate economic history students as research assistants.
Special thanks are due to Anna Martin for generously sharing not only early drafts of her biography of Dionysius Lardner, but also her source material.
The Computer Science Department at the University College London provided a visiting professorship in the fall of 2008 that greatly helped in the work on this project. Technical support from the Digital Technology Center and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota was extremely helpful. And the financial support from an ADC Chair at the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, as well as the semester research leave in the fall of 2008 and the sabbatical during the 2009--2010 academic year are greatly acknowledged.
In addition, I thank Muayyad Al-Chalabi, Ross Anderson, John Barney, Neil Barton, Donald Beadles, Bonnie Bennett, Dan Bogart, Richard Bonney, Alain Bourdeau de Fontenay, Grahame Boyes, Philip Brassett, Peter Brown, Janet Browne, Dave Burstein, Frances Cairncross, Gareth Campbell, Robert Cannon, Steven Cherry, Judi Clark, Kate Colquhoun, Frank Coluccio, Janos Csirik, Plato Demos, Rolf De Vegt, Andrew Dow, Stephen Elliott, Mordechai Feingold, Amy Friedlander, Joshua Gans, Martin Geddes, Lars Godell, Bonnie Goldsborough, Fred Goldstein, David Alan Grier, Goulven Guilcher, John Greatrex, Candace Guite, Carl Haacke, Jo Hays, Jeff Hecht, Cormac Herley, Chris Hinde, Tim Horan, Yectli Huerta, Charles Jackson, Christopher Jakes, Richard John, Brewster Kahle, David Kahn, Steve Kamman, Aman Kapoor, Frank Kelly, Kalevi Kilkki, Jon Kleinberg, Todd Koffman, Eric Krapf, Wolter Lemstra, David Levinson, Wendy Lougee, Sean McCartney, Bruce McCullough, Om Malik, Scott Marcus, George Michaelson, Ranald Michie, Tom Misa, Jay Muthuswamy, Scott Nelson, Michael Odlyzko, Paul Odlyzko, Andy Oram, Jorge Ortiz, Michael Palmer, Hui Pan, Robert Patten, Arno Penzias, Carla Rahn Phillips, Paul Polishuk, Francis Reid, Susan E. Reid, Alex Roland, Richard Rumelt, Tom Ruwart, John Ryan, Gil Sadka, Angela Sasse, Simon Schaffer, Dave Schaeffer, Steven Schear, Henning Schulzrinne, Matthew Searle, Peter Sevcik, Simon Sleight, Tom Soja, Arthur Solomon, Tom Stluka, Tim Stronge, Bart Stuck, Arielle Sumits, Aaron Swartz, Roger Taylor, Joel Tropp, Andrey Ukhov, Hal Varian, Joost van der Vleuten, Philip Webre, Sara Wedeman, John van Wyhe, Ellis Weinberger, Bill Woodcock, and Joe Zink for providing helpful information, comments, and suggestions.
Great thanks are due to the many institutions whose collections were
consulted, in particular the
Baker Library of the Harvard Business School,
British Library,
British Public Records Office,
Brunel University,
Cambridge Central Library,
Cheshire Record Office,
City University Library,
Cornell University,
Down House Archives of English Heritage,
Guildhall Library,
Leicester Libraries,
Leicestershire Records Office,
Library of Congress,
London School of Economics,
Macclesfield Library,
National Library of Scotland,
Newberry Library,
New York Public Library,
Parliamentary Archives,
Royal Institution of Great Britain,
Science Museum (of London) Library,
Stanford University,
University College London,
University of California at Santa Barbara,
University of Cambridge,
University of Chicago,
University of London,
University of Michigan,
and University of St Andrews.
The Dell'Oro Group, Optical Society of America, and RHK made some of their
materials available, and Thomson Gale kindly provided some
early guest access to
its online version of The Times.
Special thanks are due to the University of Minnesota Library,
especially its interlibrary loan staff.