The Museum of Hopeful Machines is the front hall of a family of small archives built from public records: United States patents, government datasets, and newspapers old enough to have opinions about the telegraph. Each department and sibling archive lives on its own site and keeps its own catalog.
Patent documents and drawings are reproduced from the United States Patent and Trademark Office record. Newspaper material comes from the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection. Dataset sources are named on the archives that use them. Everything reproduced here is in the public domain; curation and commentary are ours.