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Worldwide - Long Distance Communication
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- Long Distance Communication
When his wife developed severe arthritis and partial paralysis in
the mid 1850's, Antonio Meucci, a cash-strapped Italian émigré
living in the Clifton Section of Staten Island, New York, in the
United States, created a permanent wired communications link between
his wife’s room and other rooms of their house, and his office
workshop in a neighbouring building. He subsequently demonstrated
this device, which he called the teletrophone, in 1860, and
experienced a brush with fame when the invention was written up in a
small Italian-language newspaper.
Despite the attention, and the initial promises of financial
backing by potential investors, Meucci did not rise above poverty or
relative obscurity. Nothing ever came of the investments promised
him after the demonstration of his invention. Meucci himself didn't
have $250 to file for a definitive US patent, nor did he speak
English well enough to navigate successfully through the sea of
paperwork involved. As a consequence, he died a pauper in October
1896—nearly 105 years before the US House of Representatives would
officially recognize him as the inventor of the telephone, an honour
traditionally bestowed upon Alexander Graham Bell.
While Meucci developed his telephone device, in Germany, a
technical genius named Johann Philipp Reis was working on the
transmission of sound via electrical current. Like other inventors
of his era, Reis saw the equipment used in telegraphy as being the
key to sound transmission, and set out to demonstrate his Telephon
in 1860.
In October 1861, Reis announced the results of his tinkering
through a paper entitled On Telephony by the Galvanic Current, which
he read to members of the Physical Society in Frankfurt am Main. The
invention saw a short burst of attention before interest fizzled. It
became apparent that while Reis' invention could indeed transmit
sound, particularly music, the Telephon could not clearly transmit
the sound of the spoken word, and was thus too impractical to become
a widespread commercial success. Reis died of tuberculosis in 1874,
a mere 2 years before Alexander Graham Bell would file for a US
patent on the invention of the telephone.
Only a few people kept their eyes on this new technology. Elisha
Gray, a son of Barnesville, Ohio and a patented inventor in his own
right, played with the idea of sound transmission and constructed a
rudimentary telephone for which he filed a caveat notice of intent
for patent with the United States Patent Office on 14 February 1876.
By not registering for an outright patent, however, Gray left the
door open for someone else to file an official patent for the
invention.
Alexander Graham Bell of Boston, Massachusetts would not make the
same mistake as Elisha Gray. On 14 February 1876, only a few hours
before Gray filed his patent caveat, the Scotland-born Bell filed
for a patent with the United States Patent Office. He positioned
this "new" invention as a mere augmentation to telegraphy, as had
the other inventors, and he was soon the target of multiple
lawsuits.
The most common allegation against Bell asserted that he was
stealing information and ideas from other inventors to further his
own goals. Newspapers such as the 4 December 1891 issue of The
Rochester Herald openly accused the Bell Telephone Company, a
company founded by Bell in 1877, of having too cozy a relationship
with the US Patent Office.
It was even whispered that Bell had modified the contents of his
own patent right at the office, after having come across information
produced by Gray. These allegations were thrown out of court,
however, and the taint of them was buried under the mountain of new
technology that Bell’s company helped produce.
The Bell Telephone Company, hoping to patent anything and
everything that might prove useful, pulled a variety of skilled
people into its orbit. One such person, Bell’s collaborator Thomas
Watson, worked on improving methods of electrically transmitting
speech. In addition to building Bell’s prototypes, Watson himself
created a receiver, the basic foundation of which is still in use
today.
The Bell Telephone Company patented that receiver, as well as
Watson’s "polarized ringer," and the hand-crank for powering
outbound calls.
Although the public initially rejected the telephone as strange
and somehow unnatural, people awakened to its many uses. Slowly,
firms in the US and Europe began manufacturing telephones and their
related parts for public sale. The Bell Telephone Company spread
into Eastern Canada.
As the new technology crept northward to Canada from the United
States, purveyors of it encountered poor weather and a government
bent on saving money. Telephones could operate on standard telegraph
lines, but communications in Alberta had barely reached the stage
where telegraphers could reliably send coded messages.
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Heritage Community Foundation and
Telephone Historical Centre All Rights Reserved
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