Board of Ordnance & Fortification
About the archive
This guide covers the Board of Ordnance and Fortification study: selected proposal transcriptions, appropriations, allotments, and technology reviews. Each collection has its own period and source coverage.
Use the archive to find a subject, compare periods, or follow a recorded decision. Read the transcribed action before drawing conclusions from a category or chart. These records support descriptive research; they do not establish why a technology was funded or adopted.
What is included
| Dataset | Records and dates |
|---|---|
| Proposals | 1,691 records. Of these, 1,558 have years from 1897 to 1907; 133 have no recorded year. |
| Military appropriations | 109 Army and Navy entries from 1866 to 1920. Army data for 1879 is missing. |
| Board appropriations | 33 annual entries from 1888 to 1920. |
| Research allotments | 1,144 entries from 1888 to 1918, including recorded revocations. |
| Technology timeline | 202 technologies across 28 reporting periods from 1888 to 1916. |
The archive is a selected collection, not a complete inventory of the Board’s activity. The separate researcher charts may use different source sets and periods.
Reading the records
Proposal categories are automated
Keyword rules group the recorded action as Approved, Investigating, Rejected, or Other. Missing or unmatched actions belong to Other. These labels help navigation; they are not independently verified historical findings.
An approval category can include authorization or funding, not necessarily adoption by the Army. Technology clusters and government/private proposer labels are also inferred from text. Read the subject, proposer, and action together when assessing an entry.
Unknown dates remain unknown
Undated proposals stay available in the record list. The year chart excludes them. A blank technology-timeline cell means no entry in this dataset for that period, not proof that no work occurred.
Appropriations and allotments are different
Military budgets show Army and Navy appropriations. Board appropriations show funds assigned to the Board. Allotments record allocations to individual projects. They do not establish how much was ultimately spent, and a revocation is not a separate negative expenditure.
Year and allotment date are shown as transcribed and may differ; dates have not been reconciled against the original reports.
Adjusted dollar values come from the worksheet
The budget export includes nominal and 2025-dollar columns. The source worksheet supplies the adjusted values; its calculation method is not documented in this repository. The missing Army entry also makes the combined 1879 total incomplete.
Source files
The archive reads the public exports below. Source fields and page references are retained where available. Raw workbooks and scans are held separately; the exports alone do not verify the original transcription.
- Proposal records · CSVRecorded subject, proposer, action, source fields, and derived categories.
- Army and Navy appropriations · CSVAnnual nominal and source-provided adjusted values.
- Board appropriations · CSVAnnual amounts, remarks, legislation, and source links where recorded.
- Research allotments · CSVProject descriptions, amounts, dates, revocations, and page references.
- Technology timeline recordsCurated subjects-considered and financial entries grouped by technology and period.
- Classification rulesKeyword dictionaries used for proposal categories, technology clusters, and proposer types.
Research team
- Thomas Ou
- Data pipeline, dashboard, master ledger, and historical events timeline.
- Yunha
- Allotment analysis by technology, annual funding patterns, and proposal comparisons. Source research site.
- Paul B
- Technology review records and classification.
- Tanisha
- Technology prevalence analysis. Original R script.