#history of invention

Today’s #TechTuesday brings us a Pallo-Photo-Phone, a device developed by Charles A. Hoxie (1867–1941) of the General Electric Company for the purpose of “photographing” and reproducing the human voice.

The text accompanying this photograph, captured on November 6, 1922 declared that the Pallo-Photo-Phone would become “the apparatus which will make talking movies a successful reality and has introduced into radio broadcasting an entirely new element - the possibility of making a master record from which copies may be made and reproduced in the four corners of the world, just as the phonograph record is made.”

This photograph is part of Hagley Library’s collection of Chamber of Commerce of the United States photographs and audiovisual materials, Series II. Nation’s Business photographs (Accession 1993.230.II).  The Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America formed in 1912 with the purpose of advising the government on issues facing industry and business throughout the country. The majority of images in this digital collection are photographs that were taken for the Chamber’s publication, Nation’s Business.

Published from 1912 to 1999, the monthly magazine proved invaluable in communicating the Chamber’s messages to business and government, and the magazine featured images by many of the country’s most prominent photographers. This collection has not been digitized in its entirety, but you can view a selection of images from it online now in our Digital Archive by clicking here.

National Battery Day was established around the year 2000 on the birth date of the Italian chemist and physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827). Volta’s 1799 experiments on ‘voltaic piles’ of salt and covered piles of zinc and silver, cloth, or paper proved that electricity could be generated via chemical reaction and earned him a place in history as the inventor of the electric battery.

The commemorative date has since been embraced and promoted by battery and battery-adjacent industries in various nations, as well as international industry associations. Though not by the National Carbon Company, the producer of this 1924 advertisement for their ‘Hot Shot’ batteries. The National Carbon Company, founded in Ohio in 1886, produced the Columbia brand line of of batteries, the world’s first batteries manufactured for widespread consumer use, rather than industrial applications. 

The National Carbon Company was acquired by Union Carbide in 1917, though the name of another one if its brand lines lives on. Eveready batteries, first produced by the American Electrical Novelty & Manufacturing Company as ‘Ever Ready’ batteries became the brand we know today after National Carbon purchased a controlling interest in the American Electrical Novelty & Manufacturing Company in 1906, before absorbing them outright in 1914.

This advertisement is part of Hagley Library’s John Okolowicz collection of publications and advertising on radio and consumer electronics (Accession 2014.277). To view it online, alongside other material from this collection, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.