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. - Abbé
Jean-Claude-Richard de Saint-Non made this aquatint from a
drawing by Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) of