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.
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Day after that was the first telemarketer call.
“On this day [March 7] in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention–the telephone.”
On March 8, 1876 great-great-grandpa Quinn got that telemarketing call, and Grandpa Quinn said “BLOW ME!”.
That first phone call sounds super gay.
Alexander may have been responsible for a couple more well known phrases.
“Mabel, bring me another Black Label”
and
“Elementary, my Dear Watson”
Wait.
Or was that Holmes?
Watson: “No shit, Sherlock.”
But, I digress.
“Can you hear me now?”
And if he coulda seen to where the invention eventually led, he’d a probably dis-invented it.
Who remembers party lines. So fun to eavesdrop on your neighbors…
In 1975 my phone number was 38 (in Karamürsel).
I hate RAYCISS dis-information.
The telephone was invented in Uganda centuries ago for African kangz and shit. Whitey stole it.
// SARC OFF//