Come here, I want you

Today I'm celebrating the first speech transmitted by telephone

On this date in 1876, the first discernible speech was transmitted over a telephone system. Alexander Graham Bell (who had just received a patent 3 days earlier) summoned his assistant in another room by saying "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Bell trained teachers of the deaf and was a professor of vocal physiology. In his free time, he experimented with sound waves, convinced that it would be possible to transmit speech over a telegraph-like system. With the aid of Thomas Watson, they converted Bell's ideas into a practical form creating a device to transmit speech vibrations electrically between two receivers. In the first tests in June 1875, no intelligible words were transmitted but sounds resembling human speech were heard. In March 1876 Bell's telephone was successfully tested in his Boston home. It was publicly demonstrated in May before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston and successfully tested over a 2-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport in October of that year.

There have been numerous claims and counterclaims about the history of the invention of the telephone and patent lawsuits. However, Bell retained the patent. Bell is widely credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone but others provided groundbreaking research, development work, and subsequent improvements. It's been told that Bell and his partners offered to sell the patent to Western Union for $100,000 but its president balked, countering that the telephone was nothing but a toy. Two years later, that same man told colleagues that he would consider it a bargain if he could get the patent for $25 million.

Some interesting statistics about those early years:
1877 - 3,000 phones installed
1886 - over 150,000 people in the US owned telephones
1878 - first commercial switchboard began operation (21 telephones on 8 lines; many people were on a party line)
1878 - first telephone directory published - a single paper of 50 names
1878 - first telephone installed in White House; the first outgoing call was to Bell
1889 - first public coin telephone
1892 - Bell controlled 240,000 telephones

This invention change communications drastically. Just think about the history of how messages were communicated in the past, by couriers through the ages, carrier pigeons, The Pony Express, and the telegraph. There have been significant advances just in my lifetime. Things I remember...

• rotary telephones
• sharing a party line with our neighbors: we answered 2 long rings
• a 10-minute limit on the house phone
• having to contact the operator to dial a long distance number
• failing miserably at running the college switchboard in my single day of that workstudy assignment
• the only option on a busy signal was to call back later (no voicemail, no auto call return)
• answering the phone and having no idea who was on the other end (no caller id)
• answering the phone without the worry of it being a telemarketer
• always keeping a dime in your wallet for that emergency collect call home if in trouble
• using the pay phone on the dorm hall
• attaching the phone to a coupler to connect the computer to the university network
• those 'bag' phones, then called transportables
• having dedicated voice and data lines so that I could talk on the phone while connected to a computer network
• having a single telephone number

You may have a collection of old phones in your attic or basement and chuckle about how those devices have changed. Here's a Website devoted to pictures of old phones that you may enjoy. Now people walk around chatting on phone calls using little gadgets attached to their ears and make calls from automobiles without using a telephone. Practically everyone owns a cellular phone and many no longer have landline home phones. Telephone calls are made from home by many without a landline by using a computer and VoIP technology. We now register to state and federal 'Do Not Call' lists to keep telemarketers from calling us. Some people use phone codes to hide their phone number or caller id spoofing services to display a false number.

As you may have noticed on my blog, I try to find a music connection with most of my blogs posts. Bell himself was a self-taught musician. Music is definitely connected to the telephone device and its technology. Music is routinely delivered over telephone lines, while on hold. People have used the telephone keypad and its tones to either recreate songs or to create new songs too. One website has the codes you can use to play music on your phone by pressing buttons, including Happy Birthday, Auld Lang Syne, Frere Jacques, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and Louie, Louie. There are lots of songs written about telephones and calling one another. Here's a fav of mine by ELO that you may remember:
ELO (Electric Light Orchestra)- Telephone Line


As posted on YouTube by flybynightvideo

It turns out that Bell was not only a great inventor, but he also said some smart things in his lifetime. Here are some things attributed to Bell that I like:

• I believe in the future wires will unite the head offices of telephone companies in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place.
• Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
• Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
• What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.
• Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.
• When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
  

Today, I'm marveling at the wonders of the technology developed by Bell and what advancements have been made through the cooperation of so many. Today I hope that you also see the value of cooperation of many minds and also hope that we don't miss great innovations by staring at the closed doors in our lives.

Reference:
This Day in History 1876
Wikipedia articles on Alexander Graham Bell and Invention of the Telephone
Privateline.com: Telephone History

Image credit: The Library of Congress