He Said Hello Way Before Adele !

On By sciencebarblogIn Fine Wine

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

alexander_graham_bell_500px

Those are the first words said over the phone by Alexander Graham Bell back when the first functional telephone was invented in 1876.

Since then communication between humans has changed forever, look around you… literally everything is transforming sound waves to electrical waves or vice versa. Furthermore, this invention is making it possible for me to write this post and post it where anyone in the world can access it!

Bell does not have a sad ending to his story like Lavoisier’s decapitation or Marie Curie’s death by radiation… On the contrary, he lived a wealthy happy life where he did what he loved, and finally died of excessive sugar (Diabetes).

B: By Mistake

Bell tried to read Hermann von Helmholtz’s (German physicist) work about how different resonators can mimic vowels sounds, but he didn’t know how to read German, so he just looked at the schematics. Hence, he came to the conclusion that we can transform sound waves into electrical ones (which wasn’t really Helmholtz’s conclusion).

Believing that he can do it, he worked days and nights and finally invented the telephone… he was “positively” mislead!

He once said that if he were able to read German when he read Helmholtz’s work, he wouldn’t be able to create the first telephone.

E: Educator

Alexander_Graham_Bell_and_family.jpgEducation and communication were the interest of his family starting from his grandfather. Consequently, he was a professor of elocution.

Bell’s mom became deaf when he was around 12 years of age, so as a result, he decided to take his family’s work to the next level… so he worked all his life on creating new communication techniques and visible ways to communicate and to teach deaf people how to talk, and he ended up marrying a deaf woman himself.

L: Like a Fox

Alexander_Graham_Bell.jpgBell, along with his assistant, took the patent for the telephone in 1875 before even making sure that it was functional. They took the patent from the UK first, because they only accept an application if it’s not applied anywhere else in the world; when they took the UK patent, they applied to the USA one and few days later they have two patents in two different continents. Consequently, the lawsuits were filed against him everywhere in the world, because believe it or not he wasn’t the only one working on this project.

The most famous lawsuit was from Elisha Gray (an American scientists) who claims that Bell stole his ideas to come up with his invention.

So these facts make Bell the most famous inventor of the telephone and not the only one … but for sure he was the first one to create the first functional one.

L: Later in His Life

Bell ended up inventing and inspiring the invention of at least those two “technologies”:

  • Photophone: transmission of sound waves via beams, hence wireless phone (it was a successful invention).
  • Metal detector: his model failed but inspired others to the invention of our modern metal detector.

Finally, you can hear Bell’s voice over the phone fascinated by his own creation in the video bellow

 

science_bar_logo

Cocktail’s Ingredients:

 

Leave a comment