Both devices were registered at the patent office within hours of each other. There followed a bitter legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell subsequently won.
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 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.
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.
His best-known invention, the telephone, forever changed the way humans communicate with each other. Alexander Graham Bell. History: Alexander Graham Bell. Famous Scientists. Who is credited with inventing the telephone? The Library of Congress. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
He was an immigrant. Bell was born on March 3, , in Edinburgh, Scotland. After attending school in Scotland and London, the year-old immigrated to Canada with his parents in Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal.
He was an impassioned champion of a strong federal government, and played a key role in defending In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras.
By turns charismatic and ruthless, brilliant and power hungry, diplomatic and Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current AC motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. John Colgan, CEO of cloud telephony company Solgari , said: "From a faint crackle of audio in , there are now 25 million landline telephones in the UK, more than 7 billion mobile devices worldwide, with billions of people, from Edinburgh to Nova Scotia, using internet-enabled audio, video and instant message communications.
Three days before the trial, Bell was granted the , patent for his invention by US officials. 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. Poll Privacy Policy One year after the experiment, the first long-distance telephone line was deployed. Today there are 1. In , the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone service expected to replace land-line phones for most U.
Within 50 years of its invention, the telephone had become an indispensable tool in the United States. For example, people said the telephone would: help further democracy; be a tool for grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in networked communications; allow social decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the postal service to lose business; open up new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians, police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence.
Privacy was also a major concern. As is the case with the Internet, the telephone worked to improve privacy while simultaneously leaving people open to invasions of their privacy. In the beginning days of the telephone, people would often have to journey to the local general store or some other central point to be able to make and receive calls. Today, while most homes are wired and people can travel freely, conducting their phone conversations wirelessly, wiretapping and other surveillance methods can be utilized to listen in on their private business.
Yet, the invention of the telephone also worked to increase privacy in many ways. It permitted people to exchange information without having to put it in writing, and a call on the phone came to replace such intrusions on domestic seclusion as unexpected visits from relatives or neighbors and the pushy patter of door-to-door salesmen. The same could be said for the Internet — privacy has been enhanced in some ways because e-mail and instant messaging have reduced the frequency of the jangling interruptions previously dished out by our telephones.
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