Message:18541 In: TODAY.WW
From: KF5JRVDate: Tue, 10 Mar 26 08:59:00 Z
Newsgroups: TODAY.WW
Subject: Today in History - Mar 10
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The first discernible speech is transmitted over a telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his assistant i
n another room by saying, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just thre
e days before.
Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a leading authority in pub
lic speaking and speech correction. The young Bell was trained to take over the family business, and while still a teenager he
became a voice teacher and began to experiment in sound. In 1870, his family moved to Ontario, Canada, and in 1871 Bell went to
Boston to demonstrate his father’s method of teaching speech to the deaf. The next year, he opened his own school in Boston
for training teachers of the deaf and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.
In his free time, Bell experimented with sound waves and became convinced that it would be possible to transmit speech over a t
elegraph-like system. He enlisted the aid of a gifted mechanic, Thomas Watson, and together the two spent countless nights tryi
ng to convert Bell’s ideas into practical form. In 1875, while working on his multiple harmonic telegraph, Bell developed the
basic ideas for the telephone. He designed a device to transmit speech vibrations electrically between two receivers and in Ju
ne 1875 tested his invention. No intelligible words were transmitted, but sounds resembling human speech were heard at the rece
iving end.
On February 14, 1876, he filed a U.S. patent application for his telephone. Just a few hours later, another American inventor,
Elisha Gray, filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office about his intent to seek a similar patent on a telephone transmitter an
d receiver. Bell filed first, so on March 7 he was awarded U.S. patent 174,465, which granted him ownership over both his telep
hone instruments and the concept of a telephone system.
Three days later, on March 10, Bell successfully tested his telephone for the first time in his Boston home. In May, he publicl
y demonstrated the invention before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, and in June at the Centennial Expositi
on in Philadelphia. In October, he successfully tested his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport.
Alexander Graham Bell continued his experiments in communication, inventing the photophone, which transmitted speech by light r
ays, and the graphophone, which recorded sound. He continued to work with the deaf, including the educator Helen Keller, and us
ed the royalties from his inventions to finance several organizations dedicated to the oral education of the deaf. He later ser
ved as president of the National Geographic Society. Beginning in 1895, he experimented with the possibility of flight and buil
t giant man-carrying kites and a hydrofoil craft. He died in 1922 at his summer home and laboratory on Cape Breton Island, Cana
da.
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
Email KF5JRV@gmail.com
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