The Insti­tute Archives rocks. The back­ground infor­ma­tion I needed on our friend Mr. E.D. Leav­itt was bound along with the 1896 pro­ceed­ings of the MIT Soci­ety of the Arts. These meet­ings must have been pretty inter­est­ing. One had a pre­sen­ta­tion on paper-making by Mr. Arthur D. Lit­tle, who wanted to show off his col­lec­tion of rare Russ­ian water­marks. Another fea­tured a live demon­stra­tion of “Pro­fes­sor Roentgen’s X-Rays” in which the physi­cist, not­ing the appar­ent sim­i­lar­ity between X-rays and light, con­cluded to the audi­ence that X-rays must have “ther­a­peu­tic value.” Uh-huh.