Today was the day the future of the telephone was placed in Alexander Graham Bell’s hands
142 years ago to the day, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for his telephone and the rest, as they say, is history.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland and worked in London with his father, Melville Bell before they made the move across the Atlantic.
In the early 1870s the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the USA, which is where Bell started working as a teacher at a school for the deaf.
During his time in Boston, Bell became particularly interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires.
The invention of the telegraph in 1843 was a huge advancement in communication, making it nearly instantaneous.
The telegraph did however have at least one negative – it still required messages between telegraph stations and the intended recipients to be delivered by hand.
Bell then took it upon himself to improve on the telegraph by creating a ‘harmonic telegraph’, which would combine aspects of the telegraph and a record player.
Following intense research and various attempts at a device, Bell finally came up with the idea of creating a telephone with a water transmitter.
On 14 February 1876 Bell’s lawyer filed a patent application for the device at the US Patent Office.
On 7 March the same year Bell was eventually granted patent number 174 465, which covered the patent for “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound”.
https://www2.iath.virginia.edu/albell/bpat.1.html
It would only take three days before Bell successfully conducted the first test of his telephone with a water transmitter.
The telephone worked along the following principle, according to history.com “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.”
The first words ever said on telephone were by Bell himself when he said to his assistant, Thomas Watson, “Mr Watson, come here, I need you”.
Bell would later found the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885, which is now known as American telecoms company, AT&T.
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