This folder contains correspondence and other documents relating to wireless telegraphy or radio, radio technology, and radio waves generally. In addition to the unsolicited inquiries that constitute most of the documents for previous years, there are items pertaining to Edison's research for the U.S. Navy, especially submarine detection by amplified sound, similar to the material in the Naval Consulting Board and Wartime Research Papers, Special Collections Series, as well as in other Edison General File folders such as E-17-90 (World War I -- Experimental Work). The correspondents include audion inventor Lee De Forest, radio pioneer and former Edison employee Reginald A. Fessenden, physicist Llewellyn G. Hoxton of the University of Virginia, and future RCA president David Sarnoff. There are also communications from Edison experimenters Absalom M. Kennedy and Dr. Benjamin Liebowitz, as well as from Robert C. Mathis of Western Electric, who worked briefly at the West Orange laboratory in 1917.
Approximately 50 percent of the documents have been selected. The unselected material includes unsolicited inquiries from the general public about Edison's plans to make radios; copies of printed patents; radio operating instructions; and a few unidentified technical notes.
[E1775AA], Letter from Reginald Aubrey Fessenden to Thomas Alva Edison, February 9th, 1917 1917-02-09