The Hagley Vault has a special guest star this week. Miss Patience, seen here in a ca. 1936 photograph was one of NBC's first regularly filmed stars of studio 3H. 

During these early years of television, film cameras required intense light to capture images for broadcast. So much so that NBC's Betty Goodwin, television's first female announcer and fashion show consultant, began to suffer from blisters on her face from modeling clothes and make-up for hours in front of the camera. 

Fortunately for Goodwin, Miss Patience was (quite literally) made of tougher stuff. Goodwin's new co-star was a mannequin, and thus able to patiently endure the punishing heat and time required for those early screen tests.

Here's something to be grateful for next time you upgrade your home office; you no longer need heavy machinery to accomplish the job.

This undated photograph from around the 1950s shows workers delivering an early computer to the Marine Trust Company building in Buffalo, New York. It comes from a partially digitized folder of 8 photographic prints documenting the delivery, which required a flatbed truck and a crane to hoist the equipment up the side of the building.

By 1930, almost 41% of American housing units featured a telephone. But the Depression undid many of these gains. By 1933, more than 2.5 million households had cancelled their service and fewer than a third of American homes were reachable by phone. Which perhaps explains why corporations like American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Bell Telephone Company spent so much of the first half of the twentieth century trying to teach people how to use the things.

This 1939 photograph of women at a Demonstration Telephone Call Application desk is from the AT&T building at the New York World's Fair, which took place in Flushing Meadows, Queens from April 30, 1939 to October 31, 1940. 

We're offering a break from the snow and winter weather this week and sharing a glass lantern slide image of the gardens bordering a spillway pond at the Hill Girt farm of Harry and Elizabeth Haskell in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania.

The photograph was taken by William C. Spruance on June 30, 1923. It's distinctive coloration is the result of the autochrome process, an early technique for producing color photographs that relied on dyed grains of potato starch.

Spruance was an electrical engineer, a company executive on the board of directors of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, and a civic leader in Wilmington, Delaware. Spruance was also an amateur photographer and used these skills to photograph his wife Alice Lea Spruance's gardens, as well as the gardens of other wealthy residents of New Castle County between 1920 and 1925.