Communications - Overview
Tools of communication have transformed American society time and again over the past two centuries. The Museum has preserved many instruments of these changes, from printing presses to personal digital assistants.
The collections include hundreds of artifacts from the printing trade and related fields, including papermaking equipment, wood and metal type collections, bookbinding tools, and typesetting machines. Benjamin Franklin is said to have used one of the printing presses in the collection in 1726.
More than 7,000 objects chart the evolution of electronic communications, including the original telegraph of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell's early telephones. Radios, televisions, tape recorders, and the tools of the computer age are part of the collections, along with wireless phones and a satellite tracking system.
"Communications - Overview" showing 3 items.
Christmas Club
- Description (Brief)
- Flat, rectangular, celluloid card advertising the West Springfield Trust Co. Christmas Club. Yellow with black and red print, it carries the Christmas Club emblem, a black square with red and green holly in the center of card. This square contains information that reminds holders to make Christmas Club payments. In red and green print on back is a calendar for 1940.
- Christmas Clubs are savings plans in which bank customers make scheduled deposits throughout the year into a Christmas account and received the money around the holidays to shop for gifts. This card is a product of Christmas Club, A Corporation of Eaton, Pennsylvania, which sold financial institutions all of the materials they would need to create a Christmas Club.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1940
- ID Number
- 2006.0098.0611
- accession number
- 2006.0098
- catalog number
- 2006.0098.0611
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Soviet poster, Anti-Hitler catoons
- Description
- During World War II, after the breakdown of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, the Soviet news agency TASS issued a series of propaganda posters. Topics included anti-Nazi caricatures and Socialist Realist art encouraging the war effort. Beginning in June 1941, the Union of Soviet Artists established a publishing collective to produce the posters on an almost daily basis. Because they were displayed in the windows of the news agency's Moscow office, they are known as TASS window posters. It is estimated that about 1,500 different posters were produced between 1941 and 1945.
- Well-known artists and poets worked on the designs and captions, and most of the posters were produced in limited editions using the stencil process for both graphics and text. Many posters were completed and reproduced within 24 hours, making them very responsive to political issues and war news. Copies were distributed abroad by VOKS, the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Their messages helped present the USSR favorably to its new allies, including the U.S. The Museum has six of these posters received in 1943 through VOKS. Other collections outside Russia include the University of Nottingham in England and Columbia and Cornell universities in the U.S.
- TASS window poster No. 711 is a two-panel poster with anti-Hitler cartoons.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1943
- ID Number
- GA*19085
- accession number
- 167088
- catalog number
- 19085
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Poster, You Bet I'm Going Back to Sea
- Description
- During World War II, the United States government recognized that full public support and dedication to the war effort was essential to victory. To bolster support, the government hired artists to create propaganda posters, designed to promote patriotism with simple, catchy slogans and colorful images. Toiling factory workers, thrifty home front mothers, and fearless soldiers were among the most popular images used by artists to communicate the message.
- This 1942 poster commissioned by the War Shipping Administration encouraged a specific mission, designed to attract former seamen back into the Merchant Marine. At the time, American shipyards were producing cargo ships faster than crews could be assembled, forcing recruiters to rely not only on new volunteers, but also to persuade experienced mariners to leave retirement and go back to sea.
- The creation of incentive posters mainly fell under the watch of the Office of War Information, a government agency created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1942 to consolidate public information services and coordinate the sanctioned release of war news. The OWI reviewed and approved the content of newsreels, radio broadcasts, and billboards, in addition to producing hundreds of posters. Initially, the most pressing message to be communicated through posters was a warning to Americans about the dangers of discussing sensitive information like production schedules and troop movements that could be overheard by enemy spies. Over the course of the war, posters covered a variety of topics, such as encouraging the purchase of war bonds and galvanizing the work force at shipyards to keep production going on the assembly line.
- date made
- 1942
- commissioned poster
- War Shipping Administration
- directed poster program
- Office of War Information
- ID Number
- 1991.0856.07
- catalog number
- 1991.0856.07
- accession number
- 1991.0856
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center