INTRODUCTION
Each year, since its founding in 1898, the Washington Academy of Sciences has issued publications containing original papers of scientific merit. Authors have included at least 10 Nobel Prize winners as well as dozens of scientists listed in the Encyclopedia Americana, Encyclopedia Britannica, McGraw Hill's Modern Men of Science, Who's Who in America, and American Men and Women of Science.
The marvel of the Internet has made it possible for the Academy to allow the public easy access to the material contained in this collection of over 100 years of scientific thought. The listing below contains the Tables of Contents of all of the WAS publications. For the first 13 years, these publications were called "Proceedings"; since then, they have been called "Journals".
For the most part, the material has been scanned. However, if the binding of a particular document was especially fragile or if the Optical Character Reader spurned a typeface, the document in question was entered on the keyboard (adhering as closely as possible to the original format). Typically for a volunteer organization, proofreading has not been our strong point. If you encounter errors, we would appreciate it if you would let us know.
PROCEDURES
Browsing: In order to permit quicker downloads, we have listed the Tables of Contents in ten-year groups. Click on a group to bring up the Tables of Contents within that span, then click on an individual issue to retrieve the Table of Contents for that issue. (The 13 years of Proceedings are in a group by themselves).
Finding something specific: If you are looking for something specific (e.g., an author or a topic), use the Journal search engine, not the search engine on the Academy's main page. (We divided the search engines in order to maintain an acceptable search speed). Enter the search term, click "search" and the results will appear in a separate window. Clicking on a result will bring you to the page containing your search term. Once there, you can use Adobe's "search" button (the binoculars) to home in on the word.
A Note on Search Engines and Scanners: The search engines won't find everything. When an article is scanned, some letters, which look perfectly normal to the human eye (which is one heckuvan OCR) flummox the scanner and lead to bizarre results. For instance, the entry "physical quantities. M.D. Hersey" looked like "physics1 quentities. 31.D. Hsnsar" to the Adobe reader. Thus, had you searched for "physical quantities", you wouldn't have found it. The only thing we can do about it is to re-enter the Table of Contents as typed copy. We've done that when we've noticed the discrepancy, but it is beyond our resources to test each word. However, we'll keep plugging. Meanwhile, if you don't find what you want, don't assume that it's not here. Try another word that may point you to the paper. For instance, if the search engine was unable to find "Urey", you might get what you want by trying "Harold", or even "Chemistry". If you are unable to find the author or topic easily, but manage to locate it by means of brilliant detective work, please let us know what you found and we'll re-enter it.
Obtaining an article: If you want a hard copy of the article, you may obtain it by writing to The Journal, Washington Academy of Sciences, 1200 New York Avenue, Room 631, Washington DC. 20005 and stating the relevant Title, Volume, and Page Numbers. For articles printed in 1960 or later, enclose your check for $10.00 if the article is to be mailed in the U.S. or Canada; $15.00 for other countries. Articles printed prior to 1960 are priced individually. If you require one of the older articles, send an email to Journal@washacadsci.org, stating the relevant Title, Volume and Page Numbers and we will inform you of the price.
IF YOU ARE A MEMBER and you would like a downloadable copy, contact us at:
and let us know what you want. We will need the Journal issue and the article name. If the article is available to us, we will scan it and put it on the web, from whence it can be downloaded. There is no charge for this service. While all interested parties may read the requested articles, we will only respond to requests from members.
Organization
The earliest publications, the Proceedings, have their own grouping. The Journals are in groups of ten volumes. To find a specific publication, click on the group heading and then on the volume desired.
Journals Numbers 1 to 10: 1911 to 1920
Journals Numbers 11 to 20: 1921 to 1930
Journals Numbers 21 to 30: 1931 to 1940
Journals Numbers 31 to 40: 1941 to 1950
Journals Numbers 41 to 50: 1951 to 1960
Journals Numbers 51 to 60: 1961 to 1970
Journals Numbers 61 to 70: 1971 to 1980
Journals Numbers 71 to 80: 1981 to 1990