The Telegraph
Samuel Morse
Refers to the battle between Tesla's alternating-current (AC) system and Edison's rival direct-current (DC) electric power.
Current Wars
Founder of the most famous American automobile company and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
Henry Ford
American aviators, engineers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who are generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane.
Wright Brothers (Wilbur and Orville)
15 year old American inventor and television pioneer who filed his first patent at 21 and made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of the television.
Philo Taylor Farnsworth
It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations.
Telegraph
An electric current that reverses its direction many times a second at regular intervals as opposed to an electric current flowing in one direction only.
Alternating Current
More than a decade before Ford, Nikolaus Otto, a German engineer, successfully developed uses for the compressed charge in this technology which ran on petroleum gas and led to the rise modern automobile.
internal combustion engine
The Wright Brothers focused their innovations and patents on protect their discovery in manned flight by patenting methods of lateral control, wing warping, and the rudder. All these innovations were non-linear developments from their intricate knowledge of this technology.
Bicycles
Throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America and won the publicity war as a TV pioneer.
David Sarnoff
Because Morse failed to properly give him credit for his contributions, he stated in court that Morse's invention was not particularly new just more practical.
Joseph Henry
This American entrepreneur invented the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry, gaining his first patent at the age of 19.
George Westinghouse
In 1914 the average daily wage for a blue collar worker (in high-wage Detroit) was $2.34. Henry Ford was having difficulty with employee turnover at his car factory (300% annually) so he addressed it by raising the wages of (almost all) his workers to this livable wage.
$5.00 a day
While it is a fact that the Wright Brothers developed a powered aircraft, it is debatable to whether they could use this form of intellectual protection to sue anyone who built a craft with similar controls.
Patent
He was promoted by RCA as the “father of television," because he conceived two components key to that invention: the iconoscope and the kinescope.
Vladimir Zworykin
While all inventors are indebted to prior innovations and broader social systems that make their developments possible, Morse had three people who helped him develop the telegraph that he intentionally omitted.
Although he is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system, this Serbian-American also developed the underlying technology for wireless communication over long distances.
Nikola Tesla
This organization was originally formed to challenge the litigation of the fledgling automobile industry and to extract licensing fees.
Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers
An American civil engineer and aviation pioneer, born in France. He helped the Wright brothers to publicize their flying experiments.
Octave Chanute
Like Steve Jobs, this American businessman and pioneer of American radio and television never invented any technology but he is described as the "godfather" of television.
David Sarnoff
The lesson to be learned about the American system from the telegraph was that Americans focused more on this than the underlying science and process of discovery.
practical applications
The lesson to be learned about the American system from the current was was that these organizations are equally important as the significance of an idea or discovery.
Companies/Corporations
The lesson to be learned about the American system from the transformation of the automotive industry was that system of production and the public opinion in these matters rivaled the importance of the inventor.
Legal
The lesson to be learned about the American system from the display of the Wright Brothers' flyer in this museum is that national identity and prestige can be promoted through technological change,
Smithsonian
The lesson to be learned about the American system from the battle between Sarnoff and Farnsworth is one that reveals deep tensions between individual and institutional notions of this.
progress