The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History by Alan Axelrod PhD

Author:Alan Axelrod, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DK Publishing
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

An Age of Invention

If, blooming among the uncut weeds of wild greed, the Gospel of Wealth seemed miraculous, so did the incredible series of inventions that burst forth during what otherwise might have been a dull, hard Age of the Machine. Americans of the post- Civil War era were extraordinarily industrious and inventive.

“Mr. Watson, Come Here!”

Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Scotland and grew up in England. His grandfather and father earned fame as teachers of the deaf, and Alexander likewise followed this career, continuing in it after the family immigrated to Canada in 1870. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. His profound interest in the nature of speech and sound was combined with a genius for things mechanical, and he began working on a device to record sound waves graphically to show his deaf students what they could not hear. Simultaneously, Bell was also trying to develop what he and other inventors independently laboring on the problem called the “harmonic telegraph,” a device capable of transmitting multiple telegraph messages simultaneously over a single line.

About 1874, the two concepts suddenly merged in his mind. Bell wrote in his notebook that if he could “make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in density during the production of sound,” he could “transmit speech telegraphically.”

The insight was staggering: convert one form of intelligible energy (sound) into another (modulated electric current). With his tireless assistant, Thomas Watson, Bell worked on the device for the next two frustrating years. One day, in 1876, while Watson maintained what he thought would be another fruitless vigil by the receiver unit in the next room, Bell (as he recorded in his laboratory notebook) “shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’ To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.” It was the world’s first telephone call.

The new invention quickly caught on, and the Bell Telephone Company, founded by Alexander’s father-in-law, Gardner G. Hubbard, became a utility of vast proportions and incalculable importance.

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