THE JESSE EARL HYDE COLLECTION - A WINDOW INTO EARLY 20TH CENTURY GEOLOGY

The Jesse Earl Hyde lantern slide collection consists of over 2000 glass lantern slides. Prof. Hyde used these slides while teaching as professor and then chair of the Geological Sciences department at Western Reserve University from 1915 until his death in 1936.

These slides are a mix of original photographs, textbook illustrations and graphs from published papers. They span a massive range of topics covering paleontology, regional and local geology, volcanology, glaciation, human evolution, and the history of science to name a few. Many of his descriptions of different geological features were based on images of actual examples in locations spanning everything from Alaska to the Swiss Alps to the Nile to Salt Lake City to Mammoth Caves. There is also an extensive section on the geology of Ohio from the Mound Builders to the quarrying of the Berea Sandstone to the extraction of fossil fish from the Devonian Shales. Some of these lantern slides have been hand colored with exquisite detail.

More than 1200 of these glass slides have been scanned and are available on the web along with the original descriptive captions written by Prof. Hyde, giving a truly unique view on geology education in the early 1900s as well as a pictorial reference of a wide range of localities from approximately 1890-1936. The currently scanned slides can be found on the web at http://geology.case.edu/~huwig/.

Along with the slides the collection includes approximately 1500 high quality black and white photographs taken by Prof. Hyde from all over the United States. They cover his journeys throughout the United States at the 19th/20th century boundary with a unique viewpoint of a geologist from this time.

The purpose of the website is to provide the collection to a wide community of users as a historical reference as well as an educational background.

Many thanks to Susie Hanson and Prof. Ralph Harvey (both at Case Western Reserve University) for mental and financial support.