Primary Sources

What counts as a primary source here

A primary source is a record made by someone present. A lecture given by the engineer who designed the instrument. An interview with the editor who cut the film. Testimony from the standards meeting where a decision got made. Everything else on this site is a survey written afterwards from records like those.

The distinction matters because surveys inherit each other's errors. A date gets rounded in one retelling, then repeated, and twenty years later the rounded date is the number everyone cites. Going back to what a participant said puts you upstream of the copying.

Reading a first-hand account closely differs from quoting one. Participants misremember, compress timelines, and give themselves the better line in a disagreement. These pages read the source against the documentary record, note where memory and paperwork diverge, and say which parts rest only on one person's recollection.

Every page links to the original so you form your own view. Where the original sits behind a paywall or survives only as audio, the page says so and gives you the citation to find a copy elsewhere.

Reading a transcript critically

Watch for the difference between what somebody did and what they later understood themselves to have done. Participants reconstruct their own reasoning years afterwards, usually into something tidier and more deliberate than the original decision. Both versions are interesting and only one is evidence.

Note who was in the room and who was not. An account from one participant describes one vantage point, and a decision remembered as obvious by the person who proposed it is frequently remembered as contested by everybody else. Where only one account survives, that is worth saying rather than smoothing over.