Dingler's Polytechnic Journal

I've made several false starts with German.  Almost two decades ago, I tried to work my way through a textbook that was probably Breakthrough German.  This attempt was doomed on multiple grounds.  I was using a university language lab and I think I couldn't take the textbook out of it; language labs are semi-public places and I felt self-conscious about recording my poor attempts at a German accent; I needed to learn German in order to read some very tough mathematical papers written in Germany in the 1930s, and the cheery room-booking/bread-buying/train-catching dialogues weren't going to deliver that ability any time soon.  What I actually needed, though I didn't then know such things existed, was a textbook specifically about scientific German, written with the sole intention of getting the student or technician up to speed with the grammar and basic vocabulary as quickly as possible.  I have a few on my shelves now, and keep intending to have another go at raising my knowledge above the level of poor smattering that I have now.  Listening comprehension is always difficult for me, and German has a reputation of being easier than many other languages to listen to with understanding (clear syllables and a firm rhythm), so I will get around to it soon.

Anyway, today I discovered Dingler's Polytechnic Journal, a German scientific journal published from 1820 to 1931 which has been very nicely digitized and made freely available.  Here are links to the individual volumes up to 1877; for the later volumes you need to click on 'Faksimile' in the introductory paragraph and use a different interface.  Even without much knowledge of German I find it fascinating to dip into it at random (Brunel's dad makes an appearance here, for example).  The typography goes from solid Victorian Fraktur to beautiful modernism: there are adverts in the early-20th-century volumes that are astonishingly recent-looking: this from 1916.  I read somewhere, probably in some mathematician's autobiography, that almost all of the typesetting of American mathematical journals was done in Germany right up until WWII, at which point the US had to learn the skill very quickly.  The equations and graphs in the later years of the journal are beautiful.

If I learned modern German to a reasonable standard, 19th-century German wouldn't be too difficult.  I'm a bit saddened that a knowledge of modern Japanese wouldn't immediately open the door to older forms of the language (written Japanese is quite close to spoken Japanese now, but a hundred years ago it really was a different language with a different grammar; also kanji have been simplified over the years, and the kana orthography had some sense imposed on it).  But perhaps classical Japanese can be a future challenge.