[The following note describes a series of notebooks and has no documents attached to it. For that reason, a "no Documents found" message will appear if the "List Documents" button at the bottom of the note is used. To see the notebooks described here, use the "Which Series Notes?" button to enter the Series Notes or use the "Next Text" button to move to the first item in the series. Some of the images in the pocket notebooks are small, and they may be difficult to read. They can be enlarged to a more readable size by using the "image zoom" feature of the Firefox browser. Click here to download the Firefox "image zoom" add-on.]

The pocket notebooks in this series consist primarily of notes and drawings about telegraph devices and batteries. They cover the period 1867-1875 and most of the entries are in the hand of Edison and Charles Batchelor. The first book was probably begun by Edison in 1867 and contains drawings of telegraph apparatus, geometric forms, and a list of books on telegraphy and electrical science. Some of the notebooks contain miscellaneous payroll records, accounts, inventories, and work orders. These are primarily by Batchelor but occasional entries were made by others in the Newark shops. Two of the books were used by Edison in 1873 when he went to England to demonstrate his automatic telegraph. They contain drawings of telegraph devices, notes on telegraphy in England, tests of the Greenwich cable, and street addresses of telegraph instrument makers Many of the pages in the pocket notebooks are completely loose; the original order of the loose pages in the unnumbered books is sometimes unclear.

Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park.