Randy Alfred
Wired.com
3/10/2011
Photo: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates speaking into the telephone using a model prototype in 1876. (Early Office Museum)
1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, from the next room.
The Scottish-born Bell had a lifelong interest in the nature of sound. He was born into a family of speech instructors, and his mother and his wife both had hearing impairments. While ostensibly working in 1875 on a device to send multiple telegraph signals over the same wire by using harmonics, he heard a twang.
That led him to investigate whether his electrical apparatus could be used to transmit the sound of a human voice…
Read the rest at Wired.com!
H/T TigerHawk: From a certain point of view, our modern world began 135 years ago today.
