135 years ago today
From
Wired:
March 10, 1876: �Mr. Watson, Come Here � �
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. Bell�s journal, now at the Library of Congress, contains the following entry for March 10, 1876:I then 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.
I asked him to repeat the words. He answered, �You said �Mr. Watson � come here � I want to see you.�� We then changed places and I listened at S [the speaker] while Mr. Watson read a few passages from a book into the mouthpiece M. It was certainly the case that articulate sounds proceeded from S. The effect was loud but indistinct and muffled.
Watson�s journal, however, says the famous quote was: �Mr. Watson come here I want you.�
When I was working for New England Aquarium back in the 1970's, Bell's lab was nearby -- the building was torn down but bits of the foundation were still there and a plaque was placed at the site. Bell's lab was removed and set up in the phone building (now Verizon) but is now in storage and not on display at the Museum of Science.
A lot of innovation in only 135 years...
Posted by DaveH at March 10, 2011 5:07 PM