A Photograph of a Portrait of Thomas Edison, Signed and Presented to the Noted Scientist and Inventor A.J. Liebmann

Dr. Alfred J. Liebmann was a polymath: an inventor, electrical engineer, chemist, expert in filaments, author, and businessman who held many significant patents, including ones for refractory wires, tungsten electrical contact breakers, dynamo brushes, and butanediol, a solvent used in manufacturing plastics. He wrote papers across scientific disciplines, describing in one famous work how to protect penicillin in vitro from destruction. He was also an owner of the Independent Lamp Company, which he sold to General Electric, and President of the Schenley Research Institute, in which capacity he became a leading authority on distillation and brewing.

Liebmann naturally made the acquaintance of many of the great scientists of his time. For example, his electrical inventions brought him into contact with Thomas Edison and Lee DeForest, and his work on the preservation of penicillin led him to its discoverer Alexander Fleming, and to Selman Waksman, discoverer of streptomycin, the first antibiotic active against tuberculosis (for which Waksman won the Nobel Prize). And there were many others, such as Albert Einstein.

Liebmann was a noted autograph collector, and kept a collection of signed photographs, all presented to him by notables with whom he came in contact. A sepia bust photographic portrait of Edison, circa 1930, inscribed and signed “To A.J. Liebmann – Thomas A. Edison,” and presented to Liebmann.

We obtained this directly from the Liebmann descendants, and it has never before been offered for sale.