About Thomas Edison
Edison experts, we challenge you to test your Thomas Edison knowledge
Website maintained by the Edison Elementary School in Minot, North Dakota. Contains a biography geared toward children using Thomas Edison's work as illustrative lessons about success, failure, determination, and teamwork. Links are provided to other sites of Edison interest.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible.
Site contains a brief biography of Thomas Edison as well as a short essay about the invention of the electric lamp and its impact on society. Part of the National Inventors Hall of Fame's series about its inductees.
When Edison built his laboratory in 1887 he planned to make it "the best equipped and largest laboratory extant, [its] facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid and cheap development of an invention...." We're using the latest 21st-century technology to preserve these historic buildings for you and future generations of visitors. Check our Construction Update web page to watch the work as it progresses. We expect the Site will reopen in 2005
The National Park Service's online presence for the Edison National Historic Site is a repository for a large amount of Edisonia. This site is geared to be accessible to children, a resource for students, and also an engaging experience for adults. It makes available several of Edison's early sound and motion picture recordings, as well as hundreds of images, both personal and professional. A biography about Edison, and essays about his laboratory, inventions, and life away from science, written by NHS staff, provide compelling secondary material. A bibliography is posted for those interested in further research, and the site contains a list of Edison's astonishing 1,093 patents. A fun and interesting activity is a recreation of the "Edison Mental Fitness Test," which anyone hoping to be a manager in Edison's lab had to pass. An excellent site, useful for a variety of people and purposes.
The telephone was first introduced at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 and was an instant success. Although first rented only to "persons of good breeding" and seen as an expensive luxury for doctors and businessmen, the telephone soon transformed American life. Trees gave way to telephone poles as operators known as "hello girls" began to connect a sprawling continent.
A web presence for the American Experience's documentary about the telephone. Online resources include capsules on Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Thomas Alva Edison, Thomas A. Watson and their relationship to the development of the telephone; accounts of significant events in the development of the telephone; and gallery of phones from different eras. The site also has a more general "Technology Timeline," a page devoted to forgotten inventors, and links to other American Experience sites.
General
Ages of Technology
Science and Technology Timeline
Technology and Leisure in Britain after 1850
Carlyle and the Institution as Technology
Sublimity, Urbanization, and Technology
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution: An Overview
The Industrial Revolution: A Chronology
Science, Technology, and the Industrial Revolution: Selected Readings
Website with information and links regarding the technological environment of the Victorian age, i.e. the Industrial Revolution, Mining, Information Technology, etc..
The invention of the telegraph and the telephone provided the first "paving stones" for what has today become the information superhighway. The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress holds the main body of the papers of the two American inventors most responsible for the 19th century revolution in telecommunications, Samuel F. B. Morse and Alexander Graham Bell. During the next few years, manuscripts and photographs donated to the Library of Congress by descendents of Morse and Bell will be made available online as part of the American Memory Historical Collections. The production of these collections is supported by a generous gift from the AT&T Foundation.
This Library of Congress site is devoted to Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel F. B. Morse, and the early developement of telecommunications. The site is divided into two sections. The first section provides access to a selection of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers. The selection includes 4,695 items dated from 1862 to 1939. The Bell Family Papers are indexed by series, subject, and name, and the collection is searchable. However, the second section dealing with Samuel F. B. Morse, remains in the preview stage as of 09/08/2004. It gives a brief overview of the life of Morse, but it is not yet searchable and makes no reference to Morse's career as a nativist.
The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) is the online catalog of NARA's nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC area, Regional Archives and Presidential Libraries. ARC allows you to perform a keyword, digitized image and location search. ARC's advanced functionalities also allow you to search by organization, person, or topic.
The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) developed the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) to help users locate and access records held in a multitude of government libraries and repositories throughout the United States. To assist researchers, the site has a powerful search tool, a description of steps to finding records, and information on research tutorials and workshops. Links connect the NARA site with sites for individual archives and libraries and online articles outline government record-keeping procedures. Besides acting as a finding tool, the NARA also works to develop better techniques for preserving records that are valuable to the documentation of American history.
Unbelievable treasures and fascinating history await. Explore our museum and learn how the handsome steamer Arabia prospered on the rivers, perished in 1856 and was finally rediscovered 132 years later, precious cargo intact. This exhibit, in Kansas City, Mo, is many things: history, ingenuity, tragedy, adventure, perseverance, preservation and a tribute to the pioneer spirit.
Online presence for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, located in Kansas City, featuring brief histories of steamboat transportation, the Arabia,/em>, and the efforts which recovered the ship and its artifacts 132 years after its sinking. Several images accompany the accounts.
The Fifties in America were a contradictory time. This was a vibrant and wholesome era, characterized by malt shops, sock hops, beatniks and the hula hoop, hot cars and cool jazz. At the same time, however, the nation was plagued by racial injustice, anti-Communist paranoia and the dread of nuclear war. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 taught Americans an unforgettable lesson about the power of humanity's terrible new weapons, and this frightening awareness increased their concern about the spread of Communism.
1950's America: politics, pop culture, and technology broken down by year.
The Museum offers three floors of exhibitions that explore the rich diversity of American history, from "First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image" to "America on the Move."
This is the website for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The site is impressively done with many virtual exhibits. Its appeal ranges from interactive games for kids and to advanced search engines for scholars.
