Public Domain Technical Books

This is a scanned version of The Boy Electrician, 1913 version. This book is in the public domain. Currently it is in scanned form, but the eventual goal is to use OCR software to convert it to real text plus images. If you need the original TIFs (which are huge), send me an email.

WARNING

This book was written nearly 100 years ago. Safety standards were different in those days. Please use common sense and contact someone who knows what they are doing before trying any experiment that seems dangerous.

By downloading these files, you agree that Daniel Webb is not liable in any way for any harm you or others who read this book may suffer!

A Note to Girls

Many of these books have titles such as "The Boy Electrician" and "The Boy Mechanic". When these books were written nearly 100 years ago, women could not even vote. A lot of thing have changed in 100 years, and today we know that women are just as good at math, science, and invention as men. Keep in mind the times that these books were written. If these books were written today, they would be called "The Young Electrician", and "The Young Mechanic".

The Boy Electrician by Alfred P. Morgan (1913 copyright)

The Boy Electrician is an introduction to electricity and magnetism from a time when you could still build things at home that worked just like commercial gear. The fundamentals haven't changed in all this time, and the experiments and diagrams can be understood by anyone.

Download The Boy Electrician:
in Adobe PDF format (200M)

If you want to see a sample of what the book is like before you download a 200M file, try this chapter on Bells and Alarms (PDF, 4.5M). It is formatted for printing 2-up on Letter sized paper. Use Acrobat's rotate feature (View -> Rotate Counterclockwise) to view it on the screen.

Someone else scanned and put on the web the 1943 version of The Boy Electrician.

Also, Project Gutenberg has created an amazingly good quality PDF version of The Boy Mechanic.