Silvio A. Bedini
Silvio Bedini is a Historian Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution where he served on the professional staff for twenty-five years. Retired since 1987, he actively continues to research and publish history-related books and articles.
Bedini was born in the Colonial town of Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1917. After local schooling he matriculated at Columbia University, where his studies were interrupted by World War II. Volunteering for the U.S. Army Air Corps, he was subsequently transferred from Chicopee Falls Air Field to G-2 in Washington, D.C. He served three-and-a-half years and was honorably discharged as the War ended.
Returning to Connecticut, he engaged in a family business for a few years, wrote for children's magazines and true science comics, and did research for publishers of encyclopedias. In 1958 he accepted an invitation to write a brochure about the history of his hometown for its 250th anniversary, a project that just three months later resulted in a 411-page book titled
Ridgefield in Review.
In 1961 he accepted the offer of a position in Washington, D.C. as curator at the Smithsonian Institution in the new Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History), which was under construction. He recalls the swell of emotion that brought tears to his eyes as he walked toward the red-bricked Smithsonian “Castle” for his first day on the job, a place where he felt “at home” from the start. Over the next several years he was promoted from curator and Division Supervisor to Assistant Director and eventually Deputy Director of the museum. In addition to his position in administration, his subject field was antique scientific instruments. Subsequently he was offered a newly established position of Keeper of the Rare Books of the Smithsonian Institution, and succeeded in acquiring important collections of rare books in science and technology for its libraries.
Bedini’s association with land surveyors began quite accidentally about twenty years ago when a new surveying trade journal was about to go to press and the editor needed an article on surveying history. At the last minute he was called upon to write it, a tradition he continued in almost every issue for the next two decades. For the most part, early American surveyors and instrument makers were among “the little men of science,” mostly forgotten and overlooked by scholarly historians, yet whose lives aroused in Bedini considerable interest. To recover the story of a surveyor's career almost always involves considerable research—for maps, surveying records, and vital statistics—in state, county and city archives as well as local histories, church records, and local cemeteries. His intensive research on various aspects of the history of science eventually led to the writing of more than 300 articles and monographs published in scholarly periodicals, and 22 books published in the United States and Europe.
For his research and publications in 1962 Bedini received the Abbott Payson Award of the Society of the History of Technology, and in 1997 in Darmstadt, Germany he was awarded the Paul-Bunge-Preis at the General Assembly of the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry "
for the book of foremost quality on the history of scientific instruments." Three years later, in 2000, in Munich, Germany he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, "
the highest recognition from the Society of the History of Technology."
His memberships include the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of American Historians, the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Instrument Society (London), the Astrolabe Society (Paris), the Surveyors Historical Society, and most recently, the DC Association of Land Surveyors, which extended to him an Honorary Membership in December 2003. Bedini is presently completing his twenty-third book.
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