Today in History: Speech transmitted by telephone for the first time
Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days before.
On this day in 1876, the first discernible speech was transmitted over a telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summoned his assistant in another room.
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.
While in Boston, Bell Jr became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel FB Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points, with one drawback – it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time.
Bell Jr 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 over a distance.
On 14 February 1876, he filed a US patent application for his telephone. Just a few hours later, another American inventor, Elisha Gray, filed a caveat with the US Patent Office about his intent to seek a similar patent on a telephone transmitter and receiver. Bell had filed first, so on 7 March he was awarded US patent 174465, which granted him ownership over both his telephone instruments and the concept of a telephone system.
Three days later, on 10 March, 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, he showed it at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In October, he successfully demonstrated his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport.
Information courtesy of: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/speech-transmitted-by-telephone.
