¹ John 1:1 (King James Version).

² An attack on this philosophical tradition was spearheaded by Arnheim, Rudolph. See his Visual Thinking, Berkeley, 1969Google Scholar; and ‘A plea for visual thinking,’ in Mitchell, W. J. T., The Language of Images, Chicago, 1974.Google Scholar

³ Much of American historical editing has emphasized political and military leaders. See Jenkins, Reese V. and Jeffrey, Thomas E., ‘Worth a thousand words: nonverbal documents in editing’, Documentary Editing, (1984), 6, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar

⁴ Scholars concerned with the visual arts tend to produce catalogues of works, which is a way of providing visual information. In music, recordings and scores of original compositions are available and may serve similar purposes. The publication of separate editions of correspondence or diaries for artists or musicians does not provide integration of verbal and visual (sound) documentation. Examples of this segregation include Johannes Brahms and Theodor Billroth: Letters from a Musical Friendship, tr. and ed. Barkan, Hans, Norman, 1957Google Scholar; Schoenberg, Arnold, Letters, New York, 1965Google Scholar; and Strauss, Richard, A Working Friendship, the Correspondence Between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New York, 1961.Google Scholar

⁵ In universities in the United States disciplinary segregations may discourage integrated historical treatment. Traditionally, most history departments have not dealt at research level with art, music, science, or engineering but have allowed ‘separate’ disciplinary-based historians to treat their subjects.

⁶ Aside from Franklin and Jefferson, whose papers were published for reasons other than their technical work, only a small number of editions have been undertaken. The pioneer and model in many respects was Reingold's, NathanThe Papers of Joseph Henry.Google Scholar Reingold recognized the importance of drawings and presented them in a careful and thoughtful manner. Only within the last decade have projects begun to produce editions of the papers of major figures such as Einstein and Edison. Part of the work on the edition of Darwin's correspondence is being done in the United States. In technology, a pioneer is Edward C. Carter, II's edition of the papers of Henry Benjamin Latrobe. Latrobe's engineering drawings were carefully edited by Darwin Stapleton.

⁷ Many years ago, Derek J. de Solla Price argued that technology is papyrophobic and science is papyrocentric, i.e. scientists write papers and technologists make artifacts or develop processes (‘Is technology historically independent of science’, Technology and Culture, (1965), 6, pp. 553–568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Layton, Edwin T. Jr., ‘Technology as knowledge’, Technology and Culture, (1974), 15, pp. 31–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Constant, Edwin W. II, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution, Baltimore, 1980Google Scholar, chapter 1; and Goldman, Steven L., ‘The techne of philosophy and philosophy of technology’, Research in Philosophy and Technology, (1984), 7, pp. 115–144.Google Scholar

⁹ The best comprehensive popular biography is still Josephson's, MatthewEdison, A Biography, New York, 1959.Google Scholar The first volume of the Thomas A. Edison Papers is scheduled for publication in 1987 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. An excellent brief account is Hughes's, Thomas ParkeThomas Edison: Professional Inventor, London, 1976.Google Scholar An outstanding account of his invention of the incandescent lamp is Friedel, Robert and Israel's, PaulEdison's Electric Light, Biography of an Invention, New Brunswick, 1986.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Wachhorst's, WynThomas Alva Edison, An American Myth, Cambridge, Mass., 1981Google Scholar, treats historically the changing image of Edison.

¹¹ Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has emphasized his theme in many of his writings on the rise of big business in the United States. See The Visible Hand, The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.

¹² This quotation ran in the banner of the Telegrapher in the mid-1860s. See, for example, the issue of 31 July 1865.

¹³ Paul Israel is completing a doctoral dissertation in the History Department at Rutgers University, in which he is studying the role of the inventor in American business and culture in the nineteenth century. I am indebted to him for the analysis of the evolution of business capture of technology. See Jenkins, Reese V. and Israel, Paul B., ‘Thomas A. Edison: flamboyant inventor’, IEEE Spectrum, (1984), 21, pp. 74–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ ‘Newark Shop Notebook’, Cat. 1172 in Jeffrey, Thomas E. et al. , Thomas A. Edison Papers, A Selective Microfilm Edition, Part I (1850–1878), Frederick, Maryland, 1985Google Scholar (hereafter referred to as TAEM), reel 3: frame 78. The Edison Papers project is producing both a selective microfilm edition in six parts and a highly selective book edition of fifteen volumes.

¹⁵ Ferguson, Eugene S., ‘The mind's eye: nonverbal thought in technology’, Science, (1977), 197, pp. 827–836CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Layton, Edwin T. Jr., ‘Science and engineering design’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, (1984), 424, pp. 173–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hindle, Brooke, Emulation and Invention, New York, 1981.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Jenkins, Reese V., ‘Elements of style: continuities in Edison's thinking’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, (1984), 424, 149–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Edison's development of the phonograph has received little attention from scholars. The most detailed study to date is that of Wile, Raymond R., ‘The wonder of the age—the Edison invention of the phonograph’, in Phonographs & Gramophones, Edinburgh, 1977.Google Scholar See also Charbon, Paul, La Machine Parlante, Schimeck, 1981.Google ScholarKozak's, Karen J. ‘The Evolution of the phonograph: more than just inspiration’Google Scholar, is an unpublished paper prepared for my graduate seminar in the spring of 1986.

¹⁸ The first patent application for the phonograph was executed on 15 December 1877, filed on 24 December 1877 and issued as U.S. Patent 200521 (9 February 1878). See also ‘Unbound Notebooks’, Vols. 14 and 17, and ‘Unbound Notes and Drawings’ (NS-77-003), TAEM, Part I.

19 ‘Phonograph’, 3 December 1877, ‘Unbound Notebooks’, Vol. 17, TAEM, Part I, 4, p. 891.

²⁰ ‘Phonograph’, 29 November 1877, ‘Unbound Notes and Drawings’ (NS-77-003), TAEM, Part I, 7, p. 451.

²¹ See ‘Unbound Notebooks’, Vols. 14 and 17, and ‘Unbound Notes and Drawings’ (NS-77-003), TAEM, Part I.

²² Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard James Muybridge. Many people world-wide participated in the technical introduction of cinematography. For an overview of the development of cinematography see Jenkins, Reese V., Images and EnterpriseGoogle Scholar, chapter 13.

²³ Motion Picture Caveats I–IV are located in the Archives at Edison National Historic Site, West Orange New Jersey. Gordon Hendricks published all four caveats in Appendix B in his book, The Edison Motion Picture Myth, Berkeley, 1961.Google Scholar Notice that Hendricks published only the verbal text; he deleted the drawings that accompanied the caveats! John Deasey prepared an unpublished paper for my graduate seminar in the Spring of 1983.

²⁴ Motion Picture Caveat 1, p. 1.

²⁵ Jenkins, , Images and Enterprise, chapter 5Google Scholar, See also Hendricks, The Edison Motion Picture Myth, chapter 7.Google Scholar

²⁶ Dr Edward Pershey, Supervisory Curator at the Edison National Historic Site, has produced a number of tinfoil recordings on official replicas of Edison's early cylinder phonographs. In his autobiographical notes, prepared early in the twentieth century for the Dyer and Martin biography, Edison tells that when he was a presswire operator in Louisville he regularly read the exchange newspapers so that he would be well informed on the news. This was a self-conscious strategy so that he could ‘fill in the gaps’ in weak telegraph communications.

²⁷ TAEM, Part I.

²⁸ In Memoriam, v.