HOW THE 'PHONE WAS INVENTED

Northern Advocate, 24 October 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

HOW THE 'PHONE WAS INVENTED

STRANGE fact about the tele- . ■ phone is that it began as a different invention. Alexander Graham Bell wanted to perfect a machine that would aid the deaf.

It was an arrangement of magnets which picked up the sound waves of the human voice and caused an iron plate to vibrate; the idea being that stone deaf people studying those vibra-

tions, would learn to “read” speech by sight. But the vibrating plate set Graham Bell thinking in other directions. The apparatus worked over a length of wire. If the human voice in one room could make a diaphragm vibrate in the next, why couldn’t that diaphragm be arranged to produce sound? Imitate the human voice? He struggled for months to make

his apparatus talk. Then came the day when he spoke the first words ever heard over the telephone: “Mr Watson, come here, I want you!” His assistant, in a room below, rushed upstairs wild with excitement. “I can hear you I can hear the words ” he shouted. Grahaih Bell patented his apparatus in 1876—the most valuable patent ever taken out in any country. The invention that was to

change the world had no name yet—Bell just called it “an improvement in* telegraphy.” But when it was put on show at the Philadelphia Exhibition it attracted little or no attention.

Then one day the Emperor of Brazil walked in, ‘recognised his old friend Graham Bell, and inspected the instrument. Bell went to the other end of the wire and said a few words. The Emperor nearly dropped the receiver. “It talks!” he said, and so much excitement was created that the whole world heard about the telephone next day.