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.
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