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N0KFQ > TODAY 10.03.17 15:56l 81 Lines 3860 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Mar 19
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Sent: 170310/1349Z 25925@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ6.0.13
1876
Speech transmitted by telephone
On this day, the first discernible speech is transmitted over a
telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his
assistant in another room by saying, "Mr. Watson, come here; I
want you." Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent
just three days before.
Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, was
the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a leading authority in public
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
telegraph-like system. He enlisted the aid of a gifted mechanic,
Thomas Watson, and together the two spent countless nights trying
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 June
1875 tested his invention. No intelligible words were
transmitted, but sounds resembling human speech were heard at the
receiving 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 and
receiver. Bell filed first, so on March 7 he was awarded U.S.
patent 174,465, which granted him ownership over both his
telephone 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
publicly demonstrated the invention before the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in Boston, and in June at the Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia. In October, he successfully tested
his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and
Cambridgeport.
In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company with two investors,
and the first commercial applications of the telephone took
place. Within a few months, the first of hundreds of legal
challenges to Bell's telephone patent began. The U.S. Supreme
Court eventually upheld Bell's claims, and the Bell Telephone
Company enjoyed a monopoly on the telephone until the expiration
of the patent in 1894. After 1878, however, the legal battles
were out of Alexander Graham Bell's hands because he sold his
company to a group of financiers. The company, which after 1899
was led by the parent American Telephone and Telegraph Company
(AT&T), eventually grew into the largest corporation in the
world.
Alexander Graham Bell continued his experiments in communication,
inventing the photophone, which transmitted speech by light rays,
and the graphophone, which recorded sound. He continued to work
with the deaf, including the educator Helen Keller, and used the
royalties from his inventions to finance several organizations
dedicated to the oral education of the deaf. He later served as
president of the National Geographic Society. Beginning in 1895,
he experimented with the possibility of flight and built giant
man-carrying kites and a hydrofoil craft. He died in 1922 at his
summer home and laboratory on Cape Breton Island, Canada.
73, K.O. n0kfq
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