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.
Lithograph of "Indian Antiquities" pottery artifacts
- Description
- P.S. Duval and Company (c.1840s–1858) of Philadelphia printed this lithograph of “Indian Antiquities,” depicting South American woodenware, from an original sketch by John M. Stanley (1814–1872) of Detroit (1834–1840, 1864–1872) and Washington, D.C. (1850-1860). The illustration was published in 1855 by A.O.P. Nicholson in Washington, D.C. as Plate X in the “Indian remains” section of volume II of The United States Naval Astronomical Survey to the Southern Hemisphere, written by Thomas Ewbank (1792–1870).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1855
- original artist
- Wallis, O. J.
- Dreser, William
- Herbst, Francis
- graphic artist
- Sinclair, Thomas
- Dougal, William H.
- Duval, Peter S.
- printer
- Nicholson, A. O. P.
- publisher
- United States Navy
- original artist
- Richard, John H.
- Stanley, John Mix
- Siebert, Selmar
- author
- Cassin, John
- Ewbank, Thomas
- Baird, Spencer Fullerton
- Gilliss, James Melville
- ID Number
- 2007.0204.01
- accession number
- 2007.0204
- catalog number
- 2007.0204.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center