The English Mechanic was one of the most successful of all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British commercial periodicals aimed specifically at artisanal, ‘practical’ and scientific readers. Built on the example of the Mechanics' Magazine and similar cheap technical serials of the 1820s and 1830s, the English Mechanic and World of Science enjoyed a huge circulation (reaching an estimated thirty thousand in 1870) and within a decade of its launch in 1865 it had absorbed many of its rivals. For a penny, readers could digest articles explaining new inventions and scientific theories, ‘practical hints and useful recipes’, lists of patents, book reviews, advertisements, readers' notes and queries and a correspondence column that became legendary for staging fiery exchanges, usually between a regular group of pseudonymous writers, over such topics as the flat earth, electricity, screw cutting and spiritualism. It became essential reading for several generations of science and engineering students, including the physicist Oliver Lodge, who recalled that in his youth an issue of the English Mechanic inspired him to start conducting scientific experiments at home.

Nearly two decades ago, Bill Brock suggested of the English Mechanic that ‘a serious content analysis of the complete file would probably throw important new light on the reception, adaptation and adoption of all the major, and many minor (e.g. the sewing machine) Victorian and Edwardian technological inventions that had important social implications’ (in A. J. Meadows (ed.), The Development of Science Publishing in Europe (Amsterdam, 1980), p. 114). Brock's suggestion will now be much easier to explore with the publication of this set of DVDs, containing digital scans of all 3,212 issues of the periodical, from its first issue in March 1865 to the last in October 1926, when, owing partly to Britain's dire economic situation in this period, it was forced to amalgamate with its younger rival, Amateur Mechanic and Work.

The publisher of this digital version of the English Mechanic (hereafter EMD) is to be congratulated for a resource that costs a fraction of what some institutions are charged for an annual subscription to Thomson-Gale's The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985, ProQuest's Periodicals Index Online and similar electronic archives of periodicals. Each issue of the English Mechanic has been converted into a portable document format (pdf) file which can be downloaded onto a computer hard drive, although the entire run of the periodical will occupy a massive sixty gigabytes of disk space. Searching the periodical exploits the built-in features of Adobe Acrobat Reader, although the designers have thoughtfully added an Acrobat catalogue index to groups of volumes which, when searched, produce hits considerably faster than when scanning journal issues individually or in batches. Users can conduct simple full-text searches of words and phrases, or narrow the criteria to those hits in which search terms are in a particular order or within nine hundred words of each other. Clicking on the bold-type ‘hits’ in the Adobe Reader search window summons the facsimile images of the relevant periodical pages where the search terms are highlighted in blue.

Like all electronic archives of general and scientific periodicals, the EMD is an immensely powerful research tool. Within a few clicks of a computer mouse, users can track down useful information about obscure individuals, inventions and institutions, rare published letters by more famous engineers and scientific practitioners, and texts that frequently challenge our assumptions about what was possible within the Victorian worlds of the sciences and technology. I was delighted to find, for example, reports on public lectures given by Oliver Lodge that were otherwise difficult to locate, and a surprisingly balanced and vigorous engagement with the topic of occult sciences including, in 1892, a hitherto unknown series of articles on mesmerism and theosophy by the eminent socialist and theosophist Annie Besant. Of course, some of this material could have been located by using the printed indices that accompany each volume of the periodical, but there is a vast amount of material – notably advertisements and passing but crucial references to people and publications – that is glossed over in these indexes and which only a full-text search can identify.

As a DVD- or hard-disk-mounted database, EMD differs markedly from the burgeoning number of Web-based electronic archives of periodicals which allow the user to conduct searches that are faster and more complex than those possible with the current version (8.1.1) of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The Times Digital Archive, for instance, allows rapid searches of up to three keywords in various periodical sections (for instance, advertisements, business news and letters to the editor) during a time period that can be narrowed down to a single day. The most frustrating problem with EMD is its lack of a complex search facility, which means that users may be faced with inspecting a potentially bewildering number of hits before they reach those that may be relevant to their research questions. When designing Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (http://www.sciper.org), my colleagues and I thought long and hard about these issues, and instead of producing an archive of images of periodical pages allowing only limited searching, we decided to create an index of the scientific, technological and medical content of periodicals that could be searched in highly complex ways and which was enriched with scholarly interpretations of the texts and illustrations. This helps filter ‘hits’ and respects the complex organization of the periodical format itself, and also allows users to locate important non-textual material such as indirect allusions in illustrations. Perhaps a version of the EMD could be developed along the lines of the Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Edition (http://www.ncse.kcl.ac.uk), which will combine the best of full-text archives and complex and historically sensitive search functions.

The EMD's moderate cost will make it an attractive investment for libraries and more dedicated scholars. They will be disappointed with the severe limitations of its search facilities, but will relish having the entire run of a leading commercial scientific journal on their computer and thus avoiding the tedious and sometimes demoralizing task of leafing through thousands of pages of crumbling Victorian paper.