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N0KFQ > TODAY 07.03.08 08:00l 51 Lines 2445 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Mar 7
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To : TODAY@ALLUS
March 7, 1876
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
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.
Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only
two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications
market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow
inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone
technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which upheld Bell's patent rights. In the years to
come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to
emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and
form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.
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