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 2 items.
Engraved woodblock of a" Wolpi horn rattle"
- Description
- This engraved woodblock of a “Wolpi horn rattle” was prepared by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the image was published as Figure 574 (p.397) in an article by James Stevenson (1840-1888) entitled “Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona in 1879” in the Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, 1880-81.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1883
- publisher
- Bureau of American Ethnology
- printer
- Government Printing Office
- photographer
- Hillers, John K.
- author
- Stevenson, James
- ID Number
- 1980.0219.0918
- catalog number
- 1980.0219.0918
- accession number
- 1980.0219
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Engraved woodblock of a "Haida medicine rattle"
- Description
- This engraved woodblock of a “Haida medicine rattle” was prepared by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the image was published as Plate XXII.50 (p.189) in an article by William Healey Dall (1845-1927) entitled “On Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs with an Inquiry into the Bearing of Their Geographical Distribution” in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, 1881-82. According to the annual report, the mask shows “the shaman, frog, and kingfisher with continuous tongues.” The image was drawn from a “specimen obtained by J. G. Swan [(1818-1900)] at Port Townsend, W. T. from a Queen Charlotte Island Haida.”
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1884
- publisher
- Bureau of American Ethnology
- printer
- Government Printing Office
- author
- Dall, William H.
- ID Number
- 1980.0219.1294
- catalog number
- 1980.0219.1294
- accession number
- 1980.0219
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center