ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the emergence of such public-private centers of history as exemplified by the case of Franz Maria Feldhaus. Starting in 1904, he was the first as well as the most ambitious constructor of these kinds of information systems. The historiography of technology in Germany begins around 1900. Of course, there were several endeavors to study systematically the typical process by means of which technology in the form of the invention of new machines, processes and artifacts evolved. The encyclopedia of 1904 was simply the programmatic launch of a whole series of subsequent publications by Feldhaus. Feldhaus's productivity is internally based on nothing more dramatic than extensive paperwork. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he started gathering every historical datum, even the smallest hint or fragment of information, that 'somehow applies to technical history' and recording them meticulously, piece by piece, on index cards.
