Autograph Manuscript Notebook and Correspondence
Original manuscript notebook (with related correspondence) from prolific American inventor George R. Carey, including original sketches for his "Selenium Electrical Camera," one of the earliest conceptions of what would become television.
Very good.
Price: $18,000.00
Autograph Manuscript Notebook and Correspondence
"Carey's 'selenium camera' [...] is recognized by historians as an ancestor of both the facsimile machine and television." — Jeremy Norman (Origins of Cyberspace)
Live television was an entertainment perfectly suited to the nineteenth-century, so much so that the era's failure to fully develop it requires some explanation. By the late 1870s, Victorians had the camera, the telescope, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and the reasonable expectation of developing some kind of telectroscope (or telephonoscope, or electroscope) by the end of the century. As scholar Iwan Rhys Morus described the invention: "This was a machine which would do to human eyes what the telephone had already done to the voice."
Bostonian surveyor George Carey was one of the first inventors (and the first American) to propose such a machine, patenting a series of selenium-based image-transmitters, influential precursor to modern broadcast television. This notebook and correspondence document his refinement of the selenium camera and numerous related devices, all dated and with witness signatures, and his later correspondence with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which in 1880 published Carey's detailed description of the invention in the landmark article titled "Seeing by Electricity." Describing this article in his HISTORY OF TELEVISION, Albert Abramson writes: "What is of importance was that [Carey] conceived of a visual transmitter as a 'camera'" (11).
Several similar, related collections of Carey and his invention have come to market in the last twenty years, including at the legendary "Origins of Cyberspace" sale at Christie's in 2005 ($19,200), and another at Bonham's in 2014 ($12,500). A fascinating archive, worthy of further study, and a milestone in the prehistory of modern transmission and broadcast from this "early pioneer of the television art" (Shiers 12).
Read more: Norman, Origins of Cycberspace; Morus, "Looking into the Future: The Telectroscope That Wasn't There," Presenting Futures Past; Shiers, Early Television: A Bibliographic Guide to 1940; Galili, Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939.
The Object
[Boston]: [n.p.], [circa 1879]. 5'' x 3.25''. Original memo pad, containing notes and sketches (in both pencil and pen) by Carey to recto and verso of all leaves (including wrappers). [74] pages. With: 3 postal cards, 2 registered letter receipts, and envelope of correspondence from The Scientific American. With 6'' x 5.5'' off-print of selenium camera illustration labeled Plate 2.
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