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.
Cincinnati Type Foundry Army Press, first manufactured in 1862
- Description
- Henry Barth of the Cincinnati Type Foundry designed this cylinder press, known as the Army Press, for use by the armed forces during the Civil War. To make up for lost business early in the war, the Foundry also manufactured bullets for the State of Indiana and Gatling guns used in the New Orleans campaign.
- The Army Press was listed as resembling the modern common hand press in having ways, bed, tympan and fisket and a rotating cylinder that, unlike the Adams's Cottage press, moved with the press bed.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1862
- maker
- Barth, Henry
- manufacturer
- Cincinnati Type Foundry
- ID Number
- 2005.0133.01
- accession number
- 2005.0133
- catalog number
- 2005.0133.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center