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Vol. 25:3 ISSN 0160-8460 Fall 1997
Celebrating the Triumphs of American Technology
This undated sketch, probably from 1874, documents Thomas A. Edison's work on an instrument that was to be part of his quadruplex telegraph, a system that could send two messages each way simultaneously on a single wire. Typical of Edison's technical work, the sketch also has miscellaneous drawings of other circuit components, scribbled calculations, and even an offhand—but perhaps revealing—literary reference. "Beneath this stone/A youth to fame and to fortune unknown" is the 27-year-old Edison's paraphrase of lines from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "Here rests his Head upon the Lap of Earth/A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown." This drawing was collected into a scrapbook (Cat. 297) in the 1870s and is one of the five million pages at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, NJ, being scrutinized and edited by the Thomas A. Edison Papers, a project for which the NHPRC has provided support and encouragement. It is on the Edison Papers microfilm, reel 5, frame 904 (University Publications of America, 1985- ). The ENHS archive, in the care of the National Park Service, is the principal repository of Edison documents, although several tens of thousands of pages are scattered in other locations. Photo courtesy U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site. Articles on technological matters begin with "Electronic Technologies Projects Make Connections."
