Who Invented The Telephone?

By Author: allan
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In the nineteenth century, the invention of the telegraph made it possible to send noises, signals, and even music over wires from one place to another. However, the human voice had never j traveled this way. Many inventors tried to find a way to send a voice over wires, and in 1876 some of their efforts were crowned with success. Two American inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha < Gray, succeeded at almost the same time. The Court decided in Bell's favor.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Bell grew up in a family that was very interested in teaching people to speak. His grandfather had been an actor who left the theatre to teach elocution; his father was a teacher who helped deaf-mutes learns how to speak. After studying in Edinburgh and London, Bell moved to Canada with his family. Bell was frail and, since two of his brothers had died of tuberculosis, his family felt that the climate of Canada would be less damp and healthier for Alexander.

In 1871, the year after the Bells arrived in Canada, young Alexander found a job in the United States. He | worked as a teacher in a new school for the deaf in Boston, ...
... j Massachusetts. He also taught at other United States of schools. Finally, he opened a school of his own. One of his I pupils later married him.

Bell thought that if he could make speech visible by actually showing the vibrations of the voice, he could teach his deaf pupils to make the same vibrations themselves. Bell tried to find a way to reproduce the vibrations by electrical means. He was led to believe that if a wire could carry vibrations, there was no reason why it could not carry the words spoken by a person. After all, he reasoned, spoken words are only a series of different vibrations.
Bell spent his evenings experimenting with tuning forks (fork shaped pieces of metal which always I produce the same musical tone and which are used to tune pianos), metal springs, and magneto batteries. His assistant, named Watson worked with him for almost four years. They spent all their spare time, as well as their spare money, on their experiments. When their money ran out, they persuaded some businessmen to help them financially.
Finally, one day in 1874, Bell was at his receiver in one room, trying to catch the signals sent by J Watson from another room. Suddenly he heard a faint twang. He rushed into Watson's room and t found that the sound had been made accidentally when two pieces of metal had stuck together and | closed the circuit. Watson had pushed the pieces apart, and the metallic vibration had been carried to Bell over the wire. After this discovery, all they had to do was to find the best kinds of material for carrying the human voice over wires.The basic principle had been discovered.

After much experimentation, the .first telephone was exhibited at the Centennials Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. At first few people paid any attention to the young man whose table held a curious box with an unexciting appearance. However, when the judges came to inspect the new machine, they were amazed. The English scientist, William Thomson said the telephone was "the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph". The Emperor of Brazil exclaimed, "It talks!"Soon crowds gathered around the box, and Bell became famous.

Bell never lost his interest in helping the deaf. He established a fund for the study of deafness. His studies showed that deafness was increasing in America, because deaf people were kept in institutions where they met and married one another. This policy, he warned, was producing a deaf variety of the human race. He strongly advocated a policy where deaf people could be taught to use language instead of being limited to the use of sign language.
Not long after Bell's invention, telephone companies were established in the United States, Great Britain, France and many other countries.

Bell invented other things besides the telephone, but none of them were as important to mankind as the telephone. The photo phone and the graph phone were the interesting inventions. However, probably none of these late inventions gave Bell the same feeling of triumph as the telephone did