David Wenner grew up in Cocoa, Florida, ten miles from Cape Canaveral, which later became the home of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He spent many evenings watching the fireworks display caused by missile test failures and was inspired by the science (and science fiction) surrounding space travel. Throughout high school Dave believed he was going to become a physicist, but senior year a family friend encouraged him to consider a liberal arts education, leading to his enrollment at Yale University.

Following graduation from Yale with a degree in electrical engineering, Wenner received a master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University and joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Thirty years and millions of frequent flier miles later, Wenner retired as a Senior Partner after having worked in a number of offices, including New York, Copenhagen, Atlanta, and Miami (which he founded).

Retirement allowed Wenner to return to his first love — physics. While serving on two science-related nonprofit boards, he was tutored by a post-doc in physics and began the first of his scientific document collections: The History of Physics. Wenner’s collecting approach — unlike that of any other significant collector — described the entire history of physics holistically, encompassing nearly 4,000 documents. This collection now forms the heart of the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in Washington, DC. Dave then began expanding his collections of scientific documents into many other areas of interest including Mars, Early Computing, Climate Change, Meteorites, Longitude, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and more.