From Photos To CD, Newspapers Scanned Into Digital Form Make Excellent Reference Materials
An Early 20th Century Feature About A Battleship Is A Prime Example
News today happens as fast as you can snap a photo with your iPhone and send it to Twitter. But if you were a newsman 100 years ago, life was different. It didn’t move at so quick a pace. Newspapers didn’t even feature pictures until late into the 1800s, when Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst – two iconic newspaper men whose legacies live on – began running halftone photos to catch the attention of new readers.
It worked.
We’re lucky these newspapers are still around to peruse, though in digital form. While they may not stain your fingers with ink – a good thing! – they illustrate the importance of preserving history for future generations.
Scanning photos to CD saves memories, personal and public, that can later be shared with ease. In this Nov. 28, 1909, image of the North Dakota battleship, we can clearly see the vessel’s massive size, so huge it practically eclipses the city of New York (or at least a block or two). The pedestrians represent a mere fraction of its stature.
The USS North Dakota had a crew of 933. It was launched on Nov. 10, 1908, and commissioned April 10, 1910, in Boston. Four years later, the ship made its way down to Mexico. She returned north, to the East Coast, when the United States became involved in World War I. Additional travel took her to the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe before she was decommissioned on Nov. 22, 1923, and sold as scraps in 1931.
If not for scanning photos to CD, images such as this battleship and the overall newspaper pages would be lost. Thankfully, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities have partnered to create the National Digital Newspaper Program, which supports the digitization of newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. This helps new and old Americans get to know our nation’s past.
It is difficult to imagine a time when digital photography wasn’t so prevalent, when it wasn’t around to offer instant satisfaction as it does now. Yet we can’t forget the journey of those who came before us. Scanning photos to CD is a surefire way to ensure history lives on.
Tags: photo scanning