Lunch Hour

I visited my first Smithsonian museum today, American History. There's also Natural History, Air and Space, Postal, and a bevy of art galleries, plus the non-Smithsonian Holocaust Museum and National Galleries of Art. I'm not sure how long each one will take me - at least a month a piece, I'd guess - but you'll know way more than you ever wanted to before I'm done.

Today's exhibit: The Information Age. The beginning of the exhibit follows the development of data processing and information systems through 1939. Interesting material, lots of artifacts, and well displayed - you could even hear audio of a sermon from 1858 marking the occasion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. Interestingly, British and American telegraph users had major differences. In Britain, they developed technology to automatically transcribe the telegraphs, printing out the words as they arrived. In the U.S., it was generally cheaper to train and employ armies of experts who could transcribe telegraphs from Morse Code as fast as the machines could print. The result: American telegraphs arrived handwritten, British ones typewritten.