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.
Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
- Description
- William Pate & Co. of New York published this portrait of Lincoln in 1869. The engraver, Henry Gugler, is best known for his bank-note work. Although the copyright notice below the print indicates the source as an original painting by J. H. Littlefield, who was once a clerk in Lincoln's law office, the image was based on a photograph made in the Mathew Brady studio in 1864. Perhaps Littlefield made a painting after the photograph that Gugler then engraved. The Brady studio photograph of Lincoln also served as the model for the engraving that appeared on the five-dollar bill and for other portrait prints.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1869
- engraver
- Gugler, Henry
- original artist
- Littlefield, J. H.
- artist attribution
- Brady, Mathew B.
- publisher
- William Pate & Co.
- ID Number
- GA*03352
- catalog number
- 03352
- accession number
- 23155
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center