Message:18378 In: TODAY.WW
From: KF5JRVDate: Sat, 07 Mar 26 07:27:00 Z
Newsgroups: TODAY.WW
Subject: Today in History - Mar 07
Message-ID: <21073_KF5JRV>
Path: N2NOV|VE2PKT|VE3CGR|WW4BSA|N3HYM|K5DAT|KF5JRV
R:260307/0730z @:N2NOV.#RICH.NY.USA.NOAM $:21073_KF5JRV
R:260307/0730Z 63040@VE2PKT.#TRV.QC.CAN.NOAM LinBPQ6.0.25
R:260307/0729Z 70517@VE3CGR.#SCON.ON.CAN.NOAM LinBPQ6.0.25
R:260307/0729Z 47704@WW4BSA.NEFL.FL.USA.NOAM BPQ6.0.24
R:260307/0729Z 56701@N3HYM.#FRDK.MD.USA.NOAM BPQ6.0.24
R:260307/0728Z 23470@K5DAT.#NEWI.WI.USA.NOAM LinBPQ6.0.25
R:260307/0727Z 21073@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ6.0.24
On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone.
The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to
teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teac
her at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.
While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invent
ion of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of t
he telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only
one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a “harmonic telegraph,” a device th
at combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.
With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound w
aves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate–called the diaphragm–to
vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrumen
t. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days afte
r filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message—the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”
from Bell to his assistant.
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
Email KF5JRV@gmail.com
Return To Bulletin List