#history of technology

The portable phone was invented in the USSR, by Leonid Kupriyanovich, in 1958. Its early use was as a built in car phone. A later, smaller 1961 refinement of the idea looked much more like modern cel phones. 

March has been delivering both lion and lamb this week at the Hagley Museum and Library. So, on this drizzly, wet #WeaThursday, we’re sharing this seasonally appropriate cover of the March, 1952 issue of Philco News, featuring Joan Mundy, an employee of Philco Corporation’s TechRep Division.

Philco News was the monthly employee newsletter of the Philco Corporation. The company, based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was once a pioneer in the manufacture and technological development of batteries, radios, transistors, televisions, and other electronics. The company was also an innovator in the field of television broadcasting; it launched an experimental station, W3XE, in 1932. In 1941, W3XE became WPTZ, the third commercially licensed television station in the United States.

Hagley Library’s collections include 141 digital access copies of Philco News dating from 1945 to 1962. This resource is part of our John Okolowicz collection of publications and advertising on radio and consumer electronics (Accession  2014.277). To view this collection online now in our Digital Archive, click here.

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.

In 1924, Colonel J. (John) Victor Dallin (1897-1991) founded the Dallin Aerial Surveys Company.  Dallin was a Royal Flying Corps-trained pilot who served in World War One; in the latter stages of the war, he was sent on aerial photography service for reconnaissance missions.

After the war, in 1919, he put that experience to use when joined Bishop and Barker, a firm which did some aerial survey work. In the 1920s, he worked at the Philadelphia Aero Service Corporation, which operated a flying school in South Philadelphia. In 1924, he left to establish his own company and started Dallin Aerial Surveys as a single proprietorship.

Dallin Aerial Surveys produced photographs like this image of Center City Philadelphia, featuring City Hall, which was taken at 5:40 A.M. on June 24, 1934. Its clients included newspapers, businesses, municipalities, and private individuals, who contracted with the company for aerial images of factories, private estates, schools, country clubs, towns, airports, rivers, and newsworthy sites and events.

During its years of operation, the company produced not only oblique photographs of various sites for commercial purposes, but did a considerable amount of aerial photogrammerty (aerial mapping of a city, specifically the city of Philadelphia). In order to carry out his work, Dallin designed several specialized cameras and mounters. A camera used for film negatives in the 1930s had a thirty inch lens so that high vertical views could be made without flying excessively low over urban areas.

The Dallin Aerial Surveys Company closed in 1941, reportedly because he rejoined the armed services for WWII. Today, the company’s photographs live at Hagley Library in our collection of Dallin Aerial Survey Company photographs (Accession 1970.200). Our Digital Archive also more than 7,800 images from the Dallin Aerial Survey Company collection. The majority of the photographs concentrate on the Mid-Atlantic region covering a period from 1924 to 1939. To view the digital collection online now, just click here. To learn more about the Dallin Company and the collection, visit our online exhibit A Bird’s Eye View of the Delaware Valley: The Photography of the Dallin Aerial Survey Company

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.