Bathe Collection in the History of Technology

The Bathe Collection contains about 1,500 volumes on the history of technology before and after the Industrial Revolution. The collection spans the 16th to 20th centuries and provides scholars with an extensive overview of the history of technology and its practitioners.

An author of several of his own books on the history of technology, Greville Bathe donated the collection to Swarthmore, including his own books, galley proofs, and manuscripts.

Some of the highlights of this collection are Geronime Cardano's De Rerum Varietate (1557), with the first appearance in print of Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical investigations, De Re Militari by Flavius Vegetius Renatus (1532) and Jacques Besson's Theatre des Instrumens Mathematiques et Mechaniques (1579), said to be the first published book devoted to engineering.