Collins Library provides access to many resources for physics research, but there are also a huge variety of free online web sites available for everything from serious research to satisfying curiosity to making art. Just a small portion are collected here. Send me an email if you have a suggestion of a web site to add to this page!
Depiction of Archimedean Screw via the Database of Machine Drawings
The Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, based out of Rutgers University, works to try to make accesible to scholars, researchers, and the general public the more than 5 million pages of documents chronicling the life and works of Thomas Edison. As part of that work, they have created the Digital Edition of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, which is comprised of nearly 175,000 document images available online. It search capabilities allow users to search for documents by name (of an individual, an institution, a newspaper, etc), byt date, by document type (correspondence, technical notes, etc), or by a combination of those terms. This online repository is an invaluable resource for research about the life and work of Thomas Edison.
Above, an example of the documents found in the digital Thomas Edison Papers: a telegram sent from the Philadelphia Press to Edison, dated January 12th, 1896, asking him to write an article about the newly discovered "Roentgen Rays," now better known as x-rays...as well as his terse reply that he didn't have the time!