curiousa2z
Be patient till the last.
On this day in 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 teacher 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 invention of the
telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible
between two distant points. The drawback of the 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 that 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 waves
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 instrument. When that diaphragm
vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the
receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the
telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr.
Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.
Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two
hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market,
Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor
Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued,
and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld
Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood
repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone
and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern
telecommunications industry.
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 teacher 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 invention of the
telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible
between two distant points. The drawback of the 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 that 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 waves
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 instrument. When that diaphragm
vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the
receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the
telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr.
Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.
Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two
hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market,
Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor
Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued,
and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld
Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood
repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone
and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern
telecommunications industry.
