Age of Great Inventions Primary Sources
Historical documents. What clues can you gather about the time, place, players, and culture?
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Links to scans of Thomas Edison's original patent for his incandescent bulb lamp and a schematic of the iconic great invention (1879).
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Along with several photos of the ceremony marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic Museum page includes scans of a few contemporary newspaper chronicles of the event.
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Google Books now has the entire text of Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 available on the web. Fo free.
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Rutgers University has a digital collection of many of Thomas Edison's papers on the web. The document sampler link from this page provides a survey of some great materials including an exchange that led to the coining of the term "electrocution."