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 69 items.
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Barbizon School Artists
- Description
- Stephen James Ferris etched this group portrait The Barbizon School: Seven French Artists as a frontispiece for the auction catalog of works from the J. C. Runkle collection, sold in New York in March 1883. Artists of the Barbizon School, named after a rural village in France near which many of them worked outdoors, specialized in realistic landscapes and animal paintings. Samuel P. Avery had arranged the sale and the catalog, which was illustrated with fifteen etchings by four American etchers. This print marks the first time that an auction catalog contained an original etching, as opposed to the usual reproductive etchings. The New York Times gave a favorable review of Ferris’s print.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1883
- publisher
- Avery, Samuel Putnam
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14508
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14508
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
- Description
- Stephen J. Ferris, a Philadelphia painter and etcher, specialized in portraiture. He etched this portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1881, noting in pencil at the lower right that this print was the earliest proof he took from the plate. Ferris etched many subjects for a variety of publications, including art periodicals and special editions of etchings. He made both original prints and reproductive etchings after works by other artists in other media.
- This image, like several other portrait prints of Lincoln, is based on the popular photograph made by the Mathew Brady studio in 1864. Ferris collected prints and photographs to aid him in his work, and his print collection came to the Smithsonian as a gift from the Ferris family.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1881
- depicted
- Lincoln, Abraham
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14531
- catalog number
- 14531
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
View in the Alhambra, Spain
- Description
- Stephen Ferris sketched and painted this pencil and watercolor view of buildings in the Alhambra complex of Granada, Spain, in 1881. This is not a finished view but a work in progress. The people rendered in pencil outline have not been colored, and there are many second thoughts like the tree at left, which has been enlarged. While in Granada, Ferris wrote a friend that he and his son were busy making sketches “much in memorandum for future use in pictures.” So captivated were they by the city that they spent more than half their Spanish visit there.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1881
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14545
- catalog number
- 14545
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Moorish Gate, Granada
- Description
- Stephen Ferris’s watercolor view Justicia, Granada shows the Alhambra’s Gate of Justice (Puerta de la Justicia) painted during the artist’s 1881 visit to Spain. In a letter to Sylvester R. Koehler, later Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian, Ferris, deeply moved by his experiences, observed: “‘See the Alhambra and die’ seems a very appropriate expression. I feel it and have more reverence for the Arabs [sic] art than any other school.”
- Today the Gate of Justice is the main entrance to the Alhambra complex, which was completed by the Moors in the fourteenth century. The Spanish, who defeated the Moors in 1492, made later additions.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14548
- catalog number
- 14548
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Lawrence Alma-Tadema
- Description
- Paul Rajon etched the portrait of Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) during one of his annual six-month visits to England. Rajon first visited England in 1873 to execute a commission. He etched some original portraits, but most of his prints reproduced paintings by contemporary artists and old masters for publications. Alma-Tadema, a Dutch-born painter of neoclassical pictures, enjoyed a considerable success on the Continent and decided to move to London where his work was enthusiastically appreciated from the 1860s to 1890s. This print was intended not only for the European market but also for the United States, and it carries a U.S. copyright line. Rajon etched Alma-Tadema’s paintings as well as his portrait.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1883
- graphic artist
- Rajon, Paul-Adolphe
- publisher
- Knoedler & Co.
- British and Foreign Artists' Association
- ID Number
- GA*14592
- catalog number
- 14592
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Scottish Landscape
- Description
- Thomas Moran etched this rugged landscape, Bridge in the Pass of Glencoe, Scotland, in 1882 after his painting of the subject. He and his wife Mary Nimmo Moran, also an etcher, visited Scotland, her birthplace, in the spring of 1882 during a five-month stay (May–October) in the United Kingdom.
- This print is the first state of two. The second state was published by Estes and Lauriat of Boston in 1888. Moran showed this print in the New York Etching Club Exhibition in mid-January 1883. For the Club’s catalog of the exhibition, Moran etched a smaller version of this scene.
- The bridge, which is known as the Bridge of Three Waters, stands near the site in Glencoe where members of the MacDonald clan were massacred by soldiers from a Campbell regiment during a night in February 1692.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1882
- graphic artist
- Moran, Thomas
- ID Number
- GA*14737
- catalog number
- 14737
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Egyptian Street Scene
- Description
- James David Smillie etched Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s painting of a Middle Eastern street scene Lady of Cairo Visiting for the American Art Review issue of June 1881. Commenting on the issue, the New York Times noted that Smillie had been “particularly happy in his drawing” of the donkey, which appears prominently in the print.
- A catalogue raisonné of Smillie’s prints has estimated that about 10,000 impressions of this scene were made, primarily for use as art magazine illustrations. To produce such a large number of prints from a copper plate, a soft metal that deteriorates with use, the publishers would have had to face the copper by electroplating. In this process (known as “steel facing”), a thin layer of iron is deposited on the copper plate.
- Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847–1928) trained with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris and later was known as “the American Gérôme.” He made a number of trips from his Paris base to North Africa and Egypt to sketch and collect artifacts for his paintings of Egyptian and Algerian subjects.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1881
- original artist
- Bridgman, Frederick Arthur
- graphic artist
- Smillie, James David
- ID Number
- GA*14802
- catalog number
- 14802
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Maine Coast
- Description
- James David Smillie etched Old Cedars, Coast of Maine, one of his best known prints, for the American Art Review, which published it in October 1880. The print reproduced his own watercolor, painted while on holiday in the summer of 1879 in Kennebunkport.
- For this print, as detailed in his journal, Smillie made a drawing of the watercolor and transferred it to a prepared plate. Originality was not an issue at this time. Artists sometimes etched replicas after their own work in other media. Most highly valued, however, were the etchings conceived and then drawn directly on the plate.
- The popularity of Old Cedars is indicated by the attempt of German painter-etcher Hans Friedrich Emanuel Schennis (1852–1918) to pass off his copy in reverse as the original print. However, Schennis’s fraud was exposed and the fake and the original were shown together in a New York exhibition in 1885.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1880
- graphic artist
- Smillie, James David
- ID Number
- GA*14869
- catalog number
- 14869
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Curator of the Alhambra
- Description
- Stephen Ferris made this pencil sketch of a distinguished, pensive older man he called the “Curator of the Alhambra” during his two-month stay in Granada, Spain, in 1881. A watercolor in the NMAH Ferris Collection of an almost identical gentleman is identified as the “Keeper of the Tore de la Vela,” the watchtower of the fortified citadel in the Alhambra complex. While Ferris, a portrait artist, was exploring the wonders of the Alhambra, he was also busy sketching people he met.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16683
- accession number
- 119780
- catalog number
- GA*16683
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
- No Image Available
Anglo-American Telegraph Company Records, 1862-1947
- Notes
- The Anglo-American Telegraph Company was organized in 1865 as a joint British-American venture to lay an Atlantic telegraph cable. After three failed attempts by other telegraph companies, Anglo-American Telegraph Company successfully laid and operated the first trans-Atlantic cable in 1866. The company operated cables until 1912, when they were leased to Western Union
- Summary
- Records relating to the organization of the company, corporate and financial records. Corporate records include two volumes of the company's acts, charters, contracts and agreements, 1862-1883; minutes of board meetings relating to varied subjects, such as agreements between the company and other telegraph companies such as Western Union Telegraph concerning sales of property, details of trnsactions or purchases undertaken by the company. Financial records consist of nine volumes of "journals" showing monthly records of receipts, 1866-1912; nineteen volumes of ledgers reveal a detailed financial status of the company, 1866-1912; and nine volumes of cash books consist of the financial transactions of the company, 1904-early 1941. See also 1 folder of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company telegrams in the Warshaw Collection under the heading "Telegraphs"
- Cite as
- Anglo-American Telegraph Company Records, 1862-1947, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
- Date
- 1862
- 1862-1947
- 1860-1920
- 1900-1950
- author
- Anglo-American Telegraph Company, Ltd
- collector
- Electricity and Modern Physics, Division of, NMAH, SI
- Subject
- Western Union Telegraph Company
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH
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