Alexander Graham Bell

10 Key excerpts on "Alexander Graham Bell"

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  Icons of Invention

  The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates [2 volumes]

  • John W. Klooster(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  June 11, 2002 216 Icons of Invention Basilio Catania. Basilio Catania’s Work on Antonio Meucci. http://www.esanet.it/ chez_basilio/meucci.htm. Andrew Dunn. Alexander Graham Bell. Pioneers of Science series. East Sussex, United Kingdom: Wayland Ltd., 1990. Michael E. Gorman. Bell’s Path to the Invention of the Telephone. National Science Foundation. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/albell, 1994. Edwin S. Grovenor. Comments. http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistoryA/ refute.htm. Catherine Mackenzie. Alexander Graham Bell, The Man Who Contracted Space. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1928. John Micklos, Jr. Alexander Graham Bell: Inventor of the Telephone. New York: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 2006. Howard B. Rockman. Alexander Graham Bell. In Intellectual Property Law for Engineers and Scientists, pp. 103–111. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004. L. Sprague de Camp. Bell and the Telephone. In The Heroic Age of American Inven- tion, pp. 156–167. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961. The Telephone and Alexander Graham Bell 217 This page intentionally left blank Internal Combustion Engine: Otto and Diesel Library of Congress THE FOUR-CYCLE GASOLINE ENGINE AND NIKOLAUS OTTO The four-cycle, internal combustion engine, wherein a compressed fuel-air mixture charged to a cylinder is ignited electrically by a spark or glow plug, was invented in 1876 by Nikolaus Otto, a largely self-taught German engine designer. The Otto engine has undergone much development and come into extensive, worldwide use for many power needs, especially in vehicles, such as automobiles. Historical Summary of Engine Development Well before the nineteenth century, various impressive efforts had been made by competent and able innovators toward achieving the dream of rela- tively compact engines for various stationary applications and for use in self-powered, driver-controlled, wheeled vehicles for road use.

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  Power, Speed, and Form

  Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century

  • David P. Billington, David P. Billington Jr.(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE Bell and the Telephone

  A s Edison was beginning his work at Menlo Park, the telephone made its first public appearance at the Philadelphia Centennial Fair on June 25, 1876. Its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, envisioned a network of telephones that would enable any person to reach any other person in the world instantly. Bell’s ambition has yet to be fully realized but in the twentieth century the telephone became indispensable to daily life in the United States. Before the phone, voice communication was limited to distances measured in feet. Telegraph messages traveled longer distances but had to be encoded and decoded by operators at each end. With a telephone, communication was direct, and no place on the network was more than a simple phone call from any other place on it.

  Bell did not set out to invent a telephone; his original goal was to invent a better telegraph. But he soon realized that his approach to telegraphy might make voice communication possible. After patenting his telephone and then demonstrating it, he formed a company to provide telephone service and then retired from the business. As the network grew, it encountered technical difficulties, principally the attenuation or weakening of calls over longer distances. To overcome this challenge, the Bell System turned to more scientifically trained engineers, who achieved long-distance telephony and met the growing need for carrying capacity as the number of telephone subscribers grew.

  Bell to Boston

  Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) grew up with the ambition to follow the profession of his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), a well-known speech teacher at the University of Edinburgh.1 Melville Bell’s invention of “visible speech” taught deaf people how to communicate vocally (figure 3.1a and b ).2 Using this approach, his three sons worked with him as teachers of the deaf. The middle son, Alexander Graham, also took an interest in the mechanics of sound. He found that he could produce vowel sounds with tuning forks, and he learned of an experiment in which the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz had used the magnetic field of an electric current to resonate tuning forks. Bell mistakenly believed Helmholtz had demonstrated that sound could be carried by electricity. But the misunderstanding encouraged Bell to pursue the idea that speech might be carried by an electric current.3

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  Beyond Semiotics

  Text, Culture and Technology

  • Niall Lucy(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The point is that the telephone, like other technologies, is not the product only of the history of its own invention as a technical device or object; it is also, in its present form, the product of a social history of its use-designation. Similarly, the invention of radio technology (as we will see in the next chapter) did not immediately coincide with the formation of a broadcast institution - it took about thirty years for radio as we now know it to develop the appearance of its present use. To this extent, telephony is an instance of what might be called technology-in-general, though it's mainly in terms of its specificities that I want to consider it here. At the risk of too many repetitions, however, I want to stress again that whatever might be said to specify the telephone needs to be understood not simply in terms of the Kantian noumenal (the thing-in-itself), the telephone as 'pure' object, but within a context of its social uses, regulatory controls and everyday practices. 5 Not simply the telephone as 'pure' object, then, but rather the telephone as a policy object. By the same token, returning for a moment to the telephone's imagined history, the social history of the telephone's policy objectifica-tion is underpinned by a desire to overcome communication barriers The Phake Fone: Crossing (Telecommunication) Lines 43 which can be traced to its official inventor, if not also its forgotten ones. As McLuhan puts it: The invention of the telephone was an incident in the larger effort of the past century [the nineteenth] to render speech visible. Melville Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell, spent his life devising a universal alphabet that he published in 1867 under the title Visible Speech. Besides the aim to make all the languages of the world immediately present to each other in a simple visual form, the Bells, father and son, were much concerned to improve the state of the deaf.

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  The Industrial Revolution in America

  Communications, Agriculture and Meatpacking, Overview/Comparison [3 volumes]

  • Kevin Hillstrom, Laurie Collier Hillstrom, Kevin Hillstrom, Laurie Collier Hillstrom(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The scientists could also tell inventors and engineers that tuning forks could be plucked to produce sounds such as vowels. And a few hardy souls had invented devices that could transmit speech without electricity. The word telephone was in use in some circles by 1870. Into this environment stepped Alexander Graham Bell. Born in 1847 in Scotland, Bell came from a family of teachers of elocution and of the deaf. He took up this work in Boston in 1871 under the City Board of Education’s auspices and began to experiment with ways to explore how sound could be carried. He began with tuning forks and graduated to reeds, as they were more variable; by pluck- ing one attached to a permanent magnet in front of an electromagnet, he caused a current, which transmitted the reed’s tone to the receiv- ing reed. Then, he began forcing air against the transmitting reed— something like speaking against the reed and thus transmitting 44 • Communications sound. Yet this would not do. The current the magnet reed produced was inadequate, and so was the reed, even though it was more flexi- ble than the tuning fork. All he had at that point was the bare possi- bility of transmitting sound. In 1874, Bell contrived a phonoautograph, which transformed sounds into written marks. This invention made him wonder if elec- tric impulses could vibrate a membrane to re-create speech. So far, he had worked with the model of the telegraph, in which messages were sent via the interruption of current. Now, it slowly dawned on him that the telegraph was the wrong model for his purposes: he needed a continuous variation of current if he was to reproduce speech and transmit it over distances. In mid-1875, he and his mechanic, Thomas A. Watson, discovered that variation, not interruption, was the key to further development in this field. In February 1876, Bell filed a patent application for his telephone, which was suited for individual use because it was powered by an accompanying battery.

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  History of Technology Volume 15

  • Graham Hollister-Short, Frank James(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  A l e x a n d e r G r a h a m B e l l , E l i s h a G r a y a n d t h e S p e a k i n g T e l e g r a p h A C o g n i t i v e C o m p a r i s o n MICHAEL E. GORMAN, MATTHEW M. MEHALIK, W. BERNARD CARLSON AND MICHAEL OBLON ABSTRACT This paper begins by describing a cognitive framework for understanding the process of technological invention and then applies it to a case. On the same day that Alexander Graham Bell submitted a patent for a speaking telegraph, Elisha Gray submitted a caveat for the same sort of device. Rather than viewing this as a case of either simultaneous invention or outright theft, our framework suggests that the two inventors were following distinct problem-solving paths and viewed their final products differently. This claim is buttressed by a detailed consideration of the competition be-tween Bell and Gray over the multiple telegraph. INTRODUCTION On 14 February 1876 the US Patent Office received two documents describing how the human voice could be sent and received over a telegraph line. The first, submitted by a teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, was a formal application for an 'Improvement in Telegraphy', and it included a 'speaking telegraph' (Figure 17). A few hours later, a manu-facturer of telegraph instruments, Elisha Gray, submitted a preliminary application or caveat for his speaking telegraph (Figure 22). How was it that two men from different backgrounds came to file patent documents for nearly the same thing on the same day? 1 Yet there is still another coincidence. When Bell filed his patent applica-tion for a telephone he had only a conception of it, not a working device. Consequently, after filing his patent in Washington Bell returned to Boston and began a series of important experiments. 2 In the course of these 1 2 Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and the Speaking Telegraph experiments, Bell succeeded in the first transmission of human speech on 9 March 1876.

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  The Telecommunications Illustrated Dictionary

  • J.K. Petersen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  In the early 1800s, German inventor Philip Reis observed that a magnetized iron bar could be made to emit sound. In America, Charles Page made a similar discovery, terming the sound “galvanic music.” Subsequently, a number of inventors advanced telegraphic and microphonic technologies leading up to the invention of the telephone. Belgian inventor Charles Bourseul described his idea for transmitting tones in 1854, but wasn’t able to implement a fully working version before Philip Reis and Alexander Graham Bell developed their own telephonic devices. Reis first demonstrated the transmission of tones through wire in Frankfurt in 1861. He reported in a letter that he could transmit words, but there is no direct way to verify the claim.

  An innovative optic telephone, based on the stimulation through a diaphragm of a flame from an acetylene burner. The impulses were then further transmitted optically through a light-sensitive selenium cell and reflector. The optic telephone was developed by Ernst Ruhmer, and was used for long distance communications. [Scientific American, November 1, 1902.]

  Around the time of Reis’s death, an American physicist, Elisha Gray, was making numerous experiments in telegraphy and developed early concepts for harmonic telegraphy, the transmission of tones, and telephony.

  Except for the very earliest experimental models, the essential mechanical design of the dial telephone hasn’t significantly changed in about 60 years, but a number of cosmetic updates have occurred over time.

  In the mid-1800s, Italian-born Antonia Meucci was successfully experimenting with wires attached to animal membranes to transfer sound through current, but news of his significant discoveries did not become widely known outside Cuba. When he later emigrated to the U.S., he filed a caveat for a patent, in December 1871, for a teletrofono.

  Here Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his telephone invention. The inset shows one of his early sketches of the invention, from the famous Bell notebooks. Bell achieved great financial success from commercializing his discoveries.

  The better-known precursors to the telephone in America and later variations appear to have been invented more-or-less independently by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, but Bell filed his telephone patent (it was actually a precursor to the telephone, a harmonic telegraph) a few hours before Gray filed a caveat (intention to file within 3 months) in February 1876. The murky history of the invention of the telephone at this point stems in part from the fact that many innovations were being developed simultaneously and also because the inventors understood the great commercial potential of their devices. Hundreds of lawsuits were threatened and filed over the next few decades, although some claims were more amicably settled. For example, in January 1877, Bell wrote to Gray rescinding any previous accusations he may have made that Gray copied from Bell’s work. (In fact, both men may have copied from a third source, Antonia Meucci. It has been suggested, but not confirmed, that both Bell and Gray had access to Meucci’s teletrofono

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  The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone

  • Thomas Augustus Watson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  All the men I worked for at that time were not of that type. There were a few very different. Among them, dear old Moses G. Farmer, perhaps the leading practical electrician of that day. He was full of good ideas, which he was constantly bringing to Williams to have worked out. I did much of his work and learned from him more about electricity than ever before or since. He was electrician at that time for the United States Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island, and in the early winter of 1874 I was making for him some experimental torpedo exploding apparatus. That apparatus will always be connected in my mind with the telephone, for one day when I was hard at work on it, a tall, slender, quick-motioned man with pale face, black side whiskers, and drooping mustache, big nose and high sloping forehead crowned with bushy, jet black hair, came rushing out of the office and over to my work bench. It was Alexander Graham Bell, whom I saw then for the first time. He was bringing to me a piece of mechanism which I had made for him under instructions from the office. It had not been made as he had directed and he had broken down the rudimentary discipline of the shop in coming directly to me to get it altered. It was a receiver and a transmitter of his “Harmonic Telegraph,” an invention of his with which he was then endeavoring to win fame and fortune. It was a simple affair by means of which, utilizing the law of sympathetic vibration, he expected to send six or eight Morse messages on a single wire at the same time, without interference.

  Home of Mrs. Mary Ann (Brown) Sanders, Salem, Mass., where Professor Bell carried on experiments for three years which led to the discovery of the principle of the telephone

  Although most of you are probably familiar with the device, I must, to make my story clear, give you a brief description of the instruments, for though Bell never succeeded in perfecting his telegraph, his experimenting on it led to a discovery of the highest importance.

  The Birthplace of the Telephone, 109 Court Street, Boston.—On the top floor of this building, in 1875, Prof. Bell carried on his experiments and first succeeded in transmitting speech by electricity

  The essential parts of both transmitter and receiver were an electro-magnet and a flattened piece of steel clock spring. The spring was clamped by one end to one pole of the magnet, and had its other end free to vibrate over the other pole. The transmitter had, besides this, make-and-break points like an ordinary vibrating bell which, when the current was on, kept the spring vibrating in a sort of nasal whine, of a pitch corresponding to the pitch of the spring. When the signalling key was closed, an electrical copy of that whine passed through the wire and the distant receiver. There were, say, six transmitters with their springs tuned to six different pitches and six receivers with their springs tuned to correspond. Now, theoretically, when a transmitter sent its electrical whine into the line wire, its own faithful receiver spring at the distant station would wriggle sympathetically but all the others on the same line would remain coldly quiescent. Even when all the transmitters were whining at once through their entire gamut, making a row as if all the miseries this world of trouble ever produced were concentrated there, each receiver spring along the line would select its own from that sea of troubles and ignore all the others. Just see what a simple, sure-to-work invention this was; for just break up those various whines into the dots and dashes of Morse messages and one wire would do the work of six, and the “Duplex” telegraph that had just been invented would be beaten to a frazzle. Bell’s reward would be immediate and rich, for the “Duplex” had been bought by the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, giving them a great advantage over their only competitor, the Western Union Company, and the latter would, of course, buy Bell’s invention and his financial problems would be solved.

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  Misunderstanding Media

  • Brian Winston(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  6 Communicate by Word of Mouth Phase one: scientific competence Dr Hooke invents the TELEPHONE, 1665 The earliest practical telephone transmitter consisted of a diaphragm attached to a wire. The end of the wire dipped into a bowl containing an acid solution. An electrical contact was fixed to the bowl. As the voice vibrated the diaphragm so the wire moved. This created a variable resistance in the solution which was registered through the contact. The device was used by Alexander Graham Bell to utter the immortal words 'Mr Watson, come here I want you' on 10 March, 1876. Bell did not design this contrivance. Its specification had been deposited in a caveat – 'a description of an invention not yet perfected' – in the Washington Patent Office nearly a month earlier on 14 February, 1876 by Elisha Gray, the co-owner and chief scientist of a Chicago telegraphic equipment manufacturing company. 1 That same day, some two hours earlier it would seem, although no record was kept, Bell patented an 'Improvement in Telegraphy' using electromagnets and a vibrating diaphragm of a kind he had been experimenting with for many months. For the past couple of years he had been in competition with Gray, both of them in the footsteps of many others, to produce a device which could increase the capacity of telegraph wires by allowing a multiplicity of signals to be carried simultaneously. It is perhaps no wonder then that evening at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, when it must have dawned on Bell that Gray's design might well transmit sound better than his own, that he spilt the acid on his clothing. Bell's patent – US#174465 – had been allowed but a week. It had been issued a mere three days before. Yet Gray's machine was clearly superior (and more fully described) than the one Bell had sketched in his deposition

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  Computer Telephony Integration

  • William A. Yarberry Jr.(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Auerbach Publications

    (Publisher)

  1 Chapter 1 Telephony Basics Telephony, and Telephony’s laws lay hid in night God said, Let Alexander be! And all was light. An adaptation from Alexander Pope INTRODUCTION CTI (computer telephony integration) applications must mesh with the existing, legacy telephony environment. Organizations typically amortize their PBX (private branch exchange) investment between five and ten years, so new applications will need to fit the older telephony standards for the years to come. The sections below outline the fundamental telephony components upon which CTI protocols and applications reside. Although IP (Internet Protocol) telephony is replacing the existing circuit switched architecture, it is important to understand the history and fundamental concepts of “tra-ditional” telephony (sometimes called TDM, time division multiplexing). In the next two chapters, we will look at IP telephony in depth. Here we look at basic concepts that must be supported — the same business functions must be accomplished whether done by IP telephony or legacy TDM tech-nology. Also keep in mind that the enormous worldwide investments in cir-cuit-switched/TDM technology means that we will be living with mixed architectures for years to come. HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born American inventor, patented the first commercial telephone on Valentine’s Day, 1876, just two hours before a similar patent was filed by Elisha Gray of Chicago. By 1878, the first commercial telephone exchange was brought into service in New Haven, Connecticut. The earliest telephones were sold in pairs — the purchaser was sup-posed to run wires directly between the two locations that needed to com-municate. It did not take long for the nascent telephone company to realize that private wires strung over trees and buildings were going to be imprac-tical if deployed on a large scale.

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  The People's Network

  The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age

  • Robert MacDougall(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  Visions of Telephony

  Alexander Graham Bell’s original goal was not to transmit speech, but to make it visible. Bell was keenly interested in deafness—his mother, Eliza, and future wife, Mabel, were both deaf—and he considered the education of the deaf his principal purpose in life. By recording sounds in a visible way, Bell hoped to help the deaf understand spoken words. His father, the elocutionist Alexander Melville Bell, had developed a symbolic alphabet that represented the pronunciation of any phoneme with a diagram of the lips, tongue, and palate. He called it “Visible Speech.”1 The younger Bell’s experiments with sound were, in his mind, mechanical extensions of his father’s work. In 1874, Bell constructed a macabre device to trace sound vibrations on paper using a charcoal pencil and a human cadaver’s severed ear. “If we can find the definite shape due to each sound—what an assistance in teaching the deaf,” he enthused. Transmitting sound across distance was an afterthought for Bell. “I invented an apparatus by which the vibrations of speech could be seen,” he recalled in later years, “and it turned out to be a telephone.”2

  The telephone did make speech visible, just not in the way Bell had imagined. For what is a telephone wire but a visible conduit for human speech? The communications scholar James Carey famously argued that the telegraph separated communication and transportation, making it possible to send messages faster than any person, horse, or train could carry them. The electric telegraph was not really the first device to do this—smoke signals, semaphore flags, and optical telegraphs all transmit intelligence faster than human messengers. But because the electric telegraph drastically increased the speed and distance that messages could travel, it has often been seen as liberating communication from the constraints of geography or the transportation of physical objects.3

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