The Raab Collection announced today that it has acquired and sold one of the more important archives in the history of telecommunications and invention to reach the market, an archive of several hundred documents, thousands of pages, containing manuscript, printed, and photographic material. The archive charts the growth of America’s telecommunications network and contains, among other things, perhaps the most important early document of a 27-year-old Thomas Edison. The majority of the archive is unpublished and it has never been offered for sale publicly before. The archive is now at the Huntington Library, which publicized its acquisition on its site here.
Over the past decades, Raab has discovered and sold some of the most important archives and documents worldwide, and counts among its clients not only the esteemed Huntington Library, but the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, & Princeton Universities, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the British Library, and many other collecting institutions, as well as a generation of serious private collectors. Raab founders have served on the boards of institutions from the Rosenbach Library to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to educational boards.
“This archive captures an important moment in time and helps us better understand the development of what we think of today as our telecommunications system,” said Nathan Raab, Principal at The Raab Collection and author of the best-selling, newly published book, The Hunt for History (Scribner).
Historical background:
The Civil War saw the creation of the first modern military communications network, the Union telegraph lines, which allowed the military to fight what we now consider the first modern war. Lines of communication brought instant news from distant battlefields. After the war, companies like Western Union competed for the rights to emerging technologies to carry these communications and inventors, most prominently a young Thomas Edison, worked to perfect the technology.
This archive captures both periods. It is the archive of Thomas Eckert, the head of the telegraph office and responsible for its national operations, and later executive at Western Union. Eckert would switch sides and serve as tycoon Jay Gould’s man in the competing Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company. The two companies fought vigorously for one of the great early inventions of the telegraph period, the Quadruplex, invented by Thomas Edison.
