Arnold Thackray's many roles in the public life of scholarship include founding and building both the Science History Institute and the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History and Sociology of Science. Earlier, he was central to the creation of what would become the Churchill Archives Centre (the largest repository of Winston Churchill's papers) at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He also served as treasurer of the American Council of Learned Societies for over a decade. Thackray has written, edited, or published some two dozen books on the modern technosciences, from Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter-Theory and the Development of Chemistry (1970) to Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary (2015).