Research visit to Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, Chicago Public Library and Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois - April 7 to 11, 2008

Report

In the second half of the 19th century, typewriters appeared on the mass market, the postcard became popular and the telephone started spreading in the business world. Within this media landscape, Elisha Gray developed a device that transmitted the movement of a writing or drawing hand over telegraph lines to a remote fountain pen which simultaneously wrote a copy in the author's handwriting. The telautograph was hailed as "a beautiful invention" and expected to alter handwriting practices in various fields. And although it found widespread use in banks and train stations, for instance, it apparently never fulfilled its potential. My research seeks to historically situate this discrepancy in relation to today's gap which exists between a high esteem of handwriting and its vanishing practice.
The purpose of my visit to the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Historical Society was to explore the moment when the product of Elisha Gray's arduous work in developing the telautograph was demonstrated to the masses at the 1893 Chicago World's Exhibition. The telautograph exhibit was a great success and I found numerous positive reviews in newspapers and scientific journals. Within the fair's Electricity Building, the exhibit took up considerable space on the upper floor and many of the photographs of the building's interior show an immense sign stating "Gray's Telautograph, head to stairs" which was also illuminated at night.
Although the Gray National Telautograph Company so far had mainly found customers using the apparatus inside their office buildings, I found new evidence from visitors' accounts indicating that Gray's initial vision must have been that first, the transmitting unit could become a mobile device and second, that the receiving unit would be found in private households. Possibly, technical limitations disallowed these applications. One observer of the telautograph demonstrations noted that the wire coils merely represented a theoretical possibility and that "the inventor will not dare to attempt to send a drawing […] from Chicago to New York." Other visitors perceived this long-distance handwriting device as a potential rival for the telephone.
Elisha Gray attended Oberlin College in Ohio for several years and later also taught there in the physics department. The department's chair from 1924 to 1948, Lloyd W. Taylor, collected and retained documents and correspondence relating to the famous inventor. My visit to the college archives revealed that Gray early and generously shared his plans on the telautograph. As early as 1888, when Gray had just hired a technician to work full-time on the development, a fellow physicist awaiting his visit, wrote to Gray: "You will bring along one of the 'pens' will you not? to explain the theory + the practice of it."
The McGill Arts Graduate Student Travel Award allowed me to consult these important materials. They are crucial for a historically adequate analysis of a long-distance handwriting technology which was developed at a time when new typing and transmission devices appeared, a situation similar to today's challenges posed to the practice of handwriting.