50 Years Ago

Beginning with this issue of Nature, most subscribers to this journal in North America will be supplied each week with a copy which has been flown across the Atlantic by air freight and then distributed from New York by surface mail ... The increasing pace of change of science, and the urgency of a good many scientific communications, would be in themselves sufficient reason why copies of a weekly journal should not at the beginning of their useful life be incarcerated for two weeks or more in the hold of a ship. But periodicals of all kinds are more than mere providers of information. They serve also to give those who read them something which can properly be called a sense of community ... But those who see their periodicals late tend to feel excluded from an experience which others have enjoyed. This, certainly, is why out of date newspapers are so hard to read.

From Nature 7 January 1967

100 Years Ago

Readers who have copies, which they may be willing to spare, of advanced text-books, models, specimens, and apparatus for the study of geology are invited to communicate with the British Prisoners of War Book Scheme (Educational) at the Board of Education, Whitehall, S.W. A request has just reached the committee of that war charity from Ruhleben for about fifty books, etc., to enable the camp school there to establish a general course in dynamic geology and crystallography ... Books in almost every subject are urgently needed to meet the steadily increasing demands which are daily being received from British prisoners interned in enemy or neutral countries.

From Nature 4 January 1917 Footnote 1