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 1 items.
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Charles Cohill Harris Collection, ca. 1906-1976
- Notes
- Harris, radio engineer and executive, served in various capacities in the Tropical Radio Telegraph Company, a subsidiary of the United Fruit Company, 1916-1963
- Summary
- Correspondence, notes, articles, and photographs assembled by Harris on the history of the United Fruit Company and Tropical Radio Telegraph Company (TRT), 1904-1961. Also includes manuscript histories of companies; material on the application of teletypewriters to radio circuits; blueprints, schematics, reports, and manuals concerning the technical work on TRT; and a scrapbook of William Edgar Beakes, president of TRT, 1939-1943
- Cite as
- Charles Cohill Harris Collection, ca. 1906-1976, Archives Center, National Museum of American History
- Date
- 1906
- 1976
- ca 1906-1976
- 20th century
- collector
- Harris, Charles Cohill 1898- (radio engineer)
- Beakes, William Edgar
- Subject
- Fessenden, R.A
- Tropical Radio Telegraph Company
- United Fruit Company
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH