history of telephone
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The telegraph and telephone are very similar in concept, and it was through Bell's attempts to improve the telegraph that he found success with the telephone.
The telegraph had been a highly successful communication system for about 30 years before Bell began experimenting. The main problem with the telegraph was that it used Morse code, and was limited to sending and receiving one message at a time. Bell had a good understanding about the nature of sound and music. This enabled him to perceive the possibility of transmitting more than one message along the same wire at one time. Bell's idea was not new, others before him had envisaged a multiple telegraph. Bell offered his own solution, the "Harmonic Telegraph". This was based on the principal that musical notes could be sent simultaneously down the same wire, if those notes differed in pitch.
By the latter part of 1874 Bell's experiment had progressed enough for him to inform close family members about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Bell's future father in law, attorney Gardiner Green Hubbard saw the opportunity to break the monopoly exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company. He gave Bell the financial backing required for him to carry on his work developing the multiple telegraph. However Bell failed to mention that he and his accomplice, another brilliant young electrician Thomas Watson, were developing an idea which occurred to him during the summer. This idea was to create a device that could transmit the human voice electrically.
Bell and Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph at the insistence of Hubbard and a few other financial backers. During March 1875 Bell met with a man called Joseph Henry without the knowledge of Hubbard. Joseph Henry was the respected director of the Smithsonian Institution. He listened closely to Bell's ideas and offered words of encouragement. Both Bell and Watson were spurred on by Henry's opinions and continued their work with even greater enthusiasm and determination. By June 1875 they realised their goal of creating a device that could transmit speech electrically would soon be realised. Their experiments had proven different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire.
Now all they had to do was build a device with a suitable membrane capable of turning those tones into varying electronic currents and a receiver to reproduce the variations and turn them back into audible format at the other end. In early June, Bell discovered that while working on his harmonic telegraph, he could hear a sound over the wire. It was the sound of a twanging clock spring. It was on March 10th 1876 that Bell was to finally realise the success and communications potential of his new device. The possibilities of being able to talk down an electrical wire far outweighed those of a modified telegraph system, which was essentially based on just dots and dashes.
According to Bell's notebook entry for that date, he describes his most successful experiment using his new piece of equipment, the telephone. Bell spoke to his assistant Watson, who was in the next room, through the instrument and said "Mr Watson, come here, I want to speak to you."
Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3rd March 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family were leading authorities in elocution and speech correction. He was groomed and educated to follow a career in the same specialty. By the age of just 29 in 1876 he had invented and patented the telephone. His thorough knowledge of sound and acoustics helped immensely during the development of his telephone, and gave him the edge over others working on similar projects at that time. Bell was an intellectual of quality rarely found since his death. He was a man always striving for success and searching for new ideas to nurture and develop.
Answer:
Explanation:Alexander Graham Bell, (born March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scotland—died August 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada), Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments were the invention of the telephone (1876) and the refinement of the phonograph (1886).
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Overview of the invention of the telephone, with a focus on the work by Alexander Graham Bell.
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Alexander (“Graham” was not added until he was 11) was born to Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds. His mother was almost deaf, and his father taught elocution to the deaf, influencing Alexander’s later career choice as teacher of the deaf. At age 11 he entered the Royal High School at Edinburgh, but he did not enjoy the compulsory curriculum, and he left school at age 15 without graduating. In 1865 the family moved to London. Alexander passed the entrance examinations for University College London in June 1868 and matriculated there in the autumn. However, he did not complete his studies, because in 1870 the Bell family moved again, this time immigrating to Canada after the deaths of Bell’s younger brother Edward in 1867 and older brother Melville in 1870, both of tuberculosis. The family settled in Brantford, Ontario, but in April 1871 Alexander moved to Boston, where he taught at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. He also taught at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, and at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.
Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the telephone in 1876, inaugurating the 1,520-km (944-mile) telephone link between New York City and Chicago on October 18, 1892.
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Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, each independently, designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. Gray’s…
One of Bell’s students was Mabel Hubbard, daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a founder of the Clarke School. Mabel had become deaf at age five as a result of a near-fatal bout of scarlet fever. Bell began working with her in 1873, when she was 15 years old. Despite a 10-year age difference, they fell in love and were married on July 11, 1877. They had four children, Elsie (1878–1964), Marian (1880–1962), and two sons w