Learned about this in class today. It's called Google Ngram. It searches the Google Books archive and graphs your search terms by how often they appeared in books over a period of time.
Here's a sample search, using the words "railroad", "automobile" and "airplane".

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=railroad%2C+automobile%2C+airplane&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Note the slow rise of "railroad", the eventual but later rise of "automobile", and the sharp increase of "airline" in the early 1940's (introduction of commercial flights, anyone?).

This search engine allows us to visualize a huge amount of data from historic works. It's called "reading at a distance", and no, it doesn't tell us what happened, but it does tell us when things happened, which can help us see the larger "plot line" of history.

If a museum is to tell a story, it helps to first understand the plotline. Where is the risising action? The climax/golden age? Why did this denoument occur? Why does "railroad" occur the same number of times in 2000 as in 1860?

It's not a be-all-end-all, but we might find some new interesting historical "coincidences" that may actually be directly related occurences.

Try it out yourself and post back any interesting finds you come across.

--Drew Black

I tried "vacuum tube" and "transistor" --
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?co ... g=3&share=

Apparently there was a huge spike in the number of vampire sightings starting in 1995 and peaking in about 1998. Easily 3 to 4 times as many as before.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?co ... g=3&share=

Yes, that's silly, but it does prove a point. This charts when the terms were used in books. If a subject suddenly becomes popular, be it vampires, Harry Potter or Thomas the Tank Engine, the graph will spike.

In an example more relevant to railroads, airplanes appear to have peaked, significantly, in 1943, and then declined to 1/4 of their previous popularity.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?co ... g=3&share=

I don't see any method to limit it to non fiction or better yet research and scholastic publications, so you'll have to deal with the whims of Pop Culture.