Invention of the telephone
A further discrepancy observed was that the device described in the 1871 caveat employed only a single conduction wire, with the telephone's transmitter-receivers being insulated from a 'ground return' path.
Serious burns from an accident, a lack of English, and poor business abilities resulted in Meucci's failing to develop his inventions commercially in America.
A retired director general of the Telecom Italia central telecommunications research institute (CSELT), Basilio Catania,[10] and the Italian Society of Electrotechnics, "Federazione Italiana di Elettrotecnica", have devoted a Museum to Antonio Meucci, constructing a chronology of his invention of the telephone and tracing the history of the two legal trials involving Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell.
[citation needed] Reis' new invention was articulated in a lecture before the Physical Society of Frankfurt on 26 October 1861, and a description, written by himself for Jahresbericht a month or two later.
Thomas Edison tested the Reis equipment and found that "single words, uttered as in reading, speaking and the like, were perceptible indistinctly, notwithstanding here also the inflections of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression.
[23]Duquet obtained a patent on 1 Feb. 1878 for a number of modifications "giving more facility for the transmission of sound and adding to its acoustic properties," and in particular for the design of a new apparatus combining the speaker and receiver in a single unit.
[24] Alexander Graham Bell had pioneered a system called visible speech, developed by his father, to teach deaf children.
As Professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University, Bell was engaged in training teachers in the art of instructing the deaf how to speak and experimented with the Leon Scott phonautograph in recording the vibrations of speech.
This apparatus consists essentially of a thin membrane vibrated by the voice and carrying a light-weight stylus, which traces an undulatory line on a plate of smoked glass.
[26] During a June 2, 1875, experiment by Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson, a receiver reed failed to respond to the intermittent current supplied by an electric battery.
After Bell and Watson discovered on June 2, 1875, that movements of the reed alone in a magnetic field could reproduce the frequencies and timbre of spoken sound waves, Bell reasoned by analogy with the mechanical phonautograph that a skin diaphragm would reproduce sounds like the human ear when connected to a steel or iron reed or hinged armature.
On July 1, 1875, he instructed Watson to build a receiver consisting of a stretched diaphragm or drum of goldbeater's skin with an armature of magnetized iron attached to its middle, and free to vibrate in front of the pole of an electromagnet in circuit with the line.
On 10 March 1876, in a test, between two rooms in a single building, above Palace Theatre, at 109 Court Street,[30] not far from Scollay Square in Boston[31][32] showed that the telephone worked, but so far, only at a short range.
[41] Bell's telephone transmitter (microphone) consisted of a double electromagnet, in front of which a membrane, stretched on a ring, carried an oblong piece of soft iron cemented to its middle.
A funnel-shaped mouthpiece directed the voice sounds upon the membrane, and as it vibrated, the soft iron "armature" induced corresponding currents in the coils of the electromagnet.
These currents, after traversing the wire, passed through the receiver which consisted of an electromagnet in a tubular metal can having one end partially closed by a thin circular disc of soft iron.
On speaking into the mouthpiece, the iron diaphragm vibrated with the voice in the magnetic field of the bar-magnet pole, and thereby caused undulatory currents in the coil.
[44] In the first test call at a longer distance in Southern Ontario, on August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham's uncle, Professor David Charles Bell, spoke to him from the Brantford telegraph office, reciting lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet ("To be or not to be....").
[45][46] The young inventor, positioned at the A. Wallis Ellis store in the neighboring community of Mount Pleasant,[45][47] received and may possibly have transferred his uncle's voice onto a phonautogram, a drawing made on a pen-like recording device that could produce the shapes of sound waves as waveforms onto smoked glass or other media by tracing their vibrations.
The next day on August 4 another call was made between Brantford's telegraph office and Melville House, where a large dinner party exchanged "....speech, recitations, songs and instrumental music".
[45] To bring telephone signals to Melville House, Alexander Graham audaciously "bought up" and "cleaned up" the complete supply of stovepipe wire in Brantford.
According to a report quoted by John Munro in Heroes of the Telegraph: Going to the small telephone box with its slender wire attachments, Mr. Bell coolly asked, as though addressing someone in an adjoining room, "Mr. Watson, are you ready!"
[60] On January 14, 1878, at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, Bell demonstrated the device to Queen Victoria,[61] placing calls to Cowes, Southampton and London.
In response to the diaphragm's vibrations, the needle dipped more or less into the liquid, varying the electrical resistance and thus the current passing through the device and on to the receiver.
Although Edison was awarded the first patent in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention.
Thomas Alva Edison took the next step in improving the telephone with his invention in 1878 of the carbon grain "transmitter" (microphone) that provided a strong voice signal on the transmitting circuit that made long-distance calls practical.
During the time of the electrical telegraph, its main users included post offices, railway stations, major government centers (ministries), stock exchanges, a limited number of nationally distributed newspapers, large internationally significant corporations, and some very affluent individuals.
In the United States, there are numerous reflections of Bell as a North American icon for inventing the telephone, and the matter was for a long time non-controversial.
Champions of Meucci, Manzetti, and Gray have each offered fairly precise tales of a contrivance whereby Bell actively stole the invention of the telephone from their specific inventor.
Additionally, there are two female figures mounted on granite pedestals representing Humanity positioned to the left and right of the memorial, one sending and the other receiving a message.
