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Before Google There Was the Chemical Rubber Company (hackaday.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-in-one dept.

szczys writes: The CRC Handbook is one great example of how access to information has changed over the years. Now, you open up Google and find your answers. In decades past, hard data needed to solve engineering problems was embodied in volumes of text known as Databooks. One of the best known was the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook. Don't let the name fool you, the CRC Handbook contained traits, properties, equations, and much more on all kinds of materials and techniques for using them. It's still around today and has one big advantage over our searchable digital lives: you know you can trust the accuracy of the information in those books at face value while online information requires validation.

4 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Ah, the rubber bible by karolgajewski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a chemist, that was the one resource that everyone had.

    Unlike software, you never needed to know whether it was the latest version.
    However, this is a prime example of bloatware. The thing was so big and fat, it ceased to be a pocketbook. I think the last one I used had a version in the 70s.

    --
    - .k. -
  2. Trust but verify by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    As an electrical engineering undergraduate I had a professor who gave an assignment to build a filter. All semester long we had been using trusted tables from a published source for filter parameters. He asked for filter parameters that would lead us into a portion of the published table that was wrong. The point of this assignment wasn't to design yet another filter, it was to understand that errors occur everywhere. Even in trusted sources.

  3. Not really the case by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Machinery handbook, the CRC Handbook, and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are the three classics. Encyclopedia Britannica was even larger but often considered to be authoritative. CRC publishes an entire series including The CRC Handbook of Avian Body Masses. It's overstating that they were so authoritative that you could take them at face value. Hand typesetting is an expensive process and when small errors came up, the publishers had to consider the cost of correction before implementing fixes. There is also the fact that many of these works arose from the work of just a few eccentric authors (neurotypical people don't write reference works) and they weren't universal experts.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  4. Re:Trust? by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    I found an error in my CRC book.

    Didn't the checksum routine catch it?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."