England. The beginning of the last century. Outstanding inventor George Stephenson tests the first steam locomotive. A locomotive moves slowly along the rails, and a man walks in front of it. No, he does not inspect the path so that an accident does not occur. This is a boxer, and his task is to protect the locomotive from the peasants who have gathered to smash the “monster” into pieces. Hatred of the new product was aroused by various medical societies, which frightened in the newspapers that the locomotive would poison the air with its breath and that birds would fall dead in flight as a result, and passengers would inevitably be poisoned by gas as the train passed through the tunnel.
Transmitting and receiving sound over wires.
This story is very revealing. This is the fate of many brilliant inventions - they literally “fists” their way to people through the walls of ignorance, disbelief and ridicule. The telephone did not escape this fate either.
“All reasonable people, of course, know that it is absolutely impossible to transmit the human voice over a distance by means of wire, and even if it were possible, it would be completely useless,” wrote one American newspaper in 1895. But fortunately for us, there were two “unreasonable” people - physicist E. Gray and teacher of the school for the deaf and dumb A. Bell, who on February 14, 1876, independently submitted applications for devices they had invented for transmitting sounds over a distance using electricity. True, Bell brought his application two hours earlier than Gray, and therefore the championship in the invention belongs to him.
How did Bell invent his device? In 1873-1876, he considered three ideas at once - the phonautograph, the multi-channel telegraph and the telephone. With the help of a phonautograph, a device that makes sounds visible, Bell hoped to facilitate the education of the deaf and dumb. He did not achieve success, but became interested in a new question: is it possible to create sound using a membrane? Work on multi-channel telegraphs, in turn, helped to understand how signals are transmitted through wires. Bell was getting closer to creating a “talking telegraph.” True, he lacked knowledge of electrical engineering - he had to urgently learn the basics of the new science. As a result, the telephone appeared at the beginning of 1876. Was he the first, or did he have predecessors?
There were. Here are just a few of them. During excavations of one of the palaces in Peru, archaeologists discovered two gourd vessels connected by twine. Scientists have come to the conclusion that this is one of the ancestors of the telephone (the idea is still alive today - who among us did not arrange a “telephone” from matchboxes, connected by a thread?) The pumpkin intercom is about a thousand years old.
Office telephone. End of the 19th century
The ancient Incas were also known as masters of acoustics. With the help of special pipes laid in the walls of the palace, the ruler, sitting on the throne, gave orders throughout the palace and talked with his wife, who was six floors below.
Wall mounted telephone. End of the 19th century
Some buildings in medieval Pskov were equipped with wireless “telephones” - narrow channels in the walls. Apparently, in the Postnikov chambers (17th century), the gatekeeper transmitted messages upstairs about the arrival of guests and received corresponding orders from the owners. But all this, of course, is nothing more than the primitive ancestors of the telephone.
More than 10 years before Bell received a patent for his invention, a phone conversation using a rather complex device. And the conversation looked something like this. “Horses don’t eat cucumber salad,” Philip Reis shouted into the bell of his intricate apparatus. “I know this without you, old donkey!” - answered the voice of his friend, speaking into the same device, but in a different room. This happened in 1860. The creator of the “device for transmitting speech over a distance” is the German teacher Reis. His apparatus was far from perfect. It conveyed the tone satisfactorily, but distorted the timbre of the voice. The inventor himself was not aware of the importance of his discovery.
The telephone created by Bell was in no way reminiscent of a modern device, but the principles of its operation have been preserved to this day, and Bell is rightfully considered the “father” of the telephone. The caring “parent” quickly brought his child into life. On January 25, 1878, the company he founded opened the world's first telephone exchange in America. If a subscriber of this station wanted to contact someone, the telephone operator - usually young people (telephone young ladies appeared later) - answered the call and made the connection using a special plug. From that time on, the telephone began to conquer the world.
Most of all entertainment, residents of Berlin at the end of the last century loved the post office on Unter den Linden street or on Leipziger Platz. The city's first payphones appeared here. While city network had 48 subscribers. But those who had not yet installed telephones also wanted to talk, and many Berlin families were separated: some went to the post office, others to the square. And they talked to each other. Moreover, the first pay phones were free.
In Moscow in 1882, telephone communication with the Bolshoi Theater opened. In Leontyevsky Lane, 12 telephones were installed in the large hall, and microphones were placed on both sides of the theater stage. You could buy a ticket for a 10-minute session, and “... after both phones are put to your ears, some kind of vague buzzing is heard, but then all the sounds are distinguished quite clearly, only softened by distance,” wrote the Moskovskie Vedomosti newspaper " “Telephonization” did not leave even the Vatican indifferent. The telephone exchange appeared in the palace chambers on the personal instructions of Pope Leo XIII. In the library, it was used to service the internal premises where books and important documents were stored.
The first copies of telephones were neither particularly elegant nor easy to use. The audibility was so bad that they came up with special tubes into which you even had to put your nose - a very funny sight from the outside. In general, there were a variety of tubes - sometimes they were made separate (some for speaking, others for listening), sometimes they looked like modern ones, combining a microphone and an earphone with a handle. And the devices themselves were equipped with shiny chrome-plated bell cups, lined with mahogany, and sometimes the case was a real work of a foundry master. In a word, the designers did not suffer from a lack of imagination. However, not every family could afford to install the device. At the dawn of “telephonization,” few could use this expensive type of communication.
There are now more than 500 million phones in the world, and, of course, their capabilities are much wider than those of the first devices. A telephone with a digital dialer (no need to wait for the dial to turn back) is no longer a novelty. There are many other innovations. When the number you are calling is busy, the device will “remember” it and connect you to the subscriber when he is free. But if they can’t get through to you, he will delicately let you know about it with a slight click on the phone.
Overhead telephone wires. Philadelphia. End of the 19th century
There are phones without wires. Voice transmission is carried out using infrared rays to a special device placed on the wall. So you can freely move around the room without worrying about the wire. A special device has also been developed (it connects to the phone) that allows owners to hear what is happening in the apartment they have left for a long time. Can you imagine the convenience for parents who left their children at home alone? And for children?
In remote areas where there is no regular telephone service, the situation is resolved as follows. The conference booth is equipped solar battery, which provides power to the radiotelephone and charges rechargeable batteries in case the sun disappears behind the clouds. Using a similar telephone, only portable, climbers communicate with their comrades who have stopped at the foot of the mountain.
In a number of countries, you can talk by phone with a subscriber in any city while flying on a passenger plane. A telephone has even been created for the deaf - a “combiphone”. It looks like a TV, words appear on the left side of the screen, and on the right side, which transmits, you can write text. The first color VCR lines are in operation.
There is a telephone with a retractable mirror (especially for female secretaries), calendar telephones and clock telephones, “anti-flu” telephones, the handsets of which are equipped with a special sterilizing device.
We are used to the fact that by picking up the phone we can find out the time, call a doctor or book train or plane tickets, but there are many other services that not everyone knows about. For example, you can obtain information about the operation of all types of transport and communications, the location of streets, decisions and regulations of local authorities, and much more. Such information services exist in many countries around the world. What you won't find out by typing desired number! Has been working in Vienna for many years " children's phone" On weekdays from 9 am to 6 pm, any child can ask a question and receive an answer or advice. Most often, they are asked to help solve a school problem; there are also complaints about parents with whom service workers can have a “conversation.”
In Tokyo, by telephone they learn about the state of highways, the number of cars on the roads, receive recipes for cooking, and fishermen receive information about where the best bite is. In some cities in Brazil you will laugh at a witty joke recorded on tape, and in Los Angeles, when you dial a number, you will hear a terrible coughing attack caused by many years of smoking - this is especially for those who want to give up a bad habit.
The telephone has long attracted all sorts of pranksters. How to call Julius Caesar? Residents of the West German city of Vilingen know the answer to this question. You need to open the telephone directory and read: “Julius Caesar, profession - tyrant, telephone: 8-45-36.” If someone connects with this number, it means that the joke of the person who provided the “certificate” (and for a fee) was quite successful. The workers themselves joke telephone network. Thus, for the birthday of the Italian Minister of Post, the telephone operators of Palermo serving long-distance lines presented him with the “Golden Book”. It contains, in alphabetical order, the nicknames that subscribers have used to call telephone operators for six months. There were 2804 of them!
Unfortunately, telephone jokes are not always harmless. The most common “joke” of both young and old fools all over the world is calling the fire department. In the USA they put a barrier to this. After the wave false calls paralyzed the work of the fire department of one of the cities, a new telephone booth was invented. If someone walks in and dials the fire brigade, the door will only open after 5 minutes - plenty of time for the police.
In June 1876, the St. Petersburg newspaper “Slovo” wrote: “The telephone will rightfully take the most honorable place among the most useful inventions of the present century. But for now, the benefits brought by the phone are insignificant. In hotels and rich houses, telephones are used to call servants and give them orders, in some offices - for conversations between the boss and his subordinates.”
A little over 100 years have passed, and the newspaper's predictions have been fully justified. The telephone has become a necessary assistant for all of us. It provides huge savings in time and money. And it is impossible to express in numbers the benefit that a lightning-fast phone call brings to a doctor in case of an accident or to the fire brigade in case of a fire...
Do you know?
When did the word “hello” appear, with which almost every telephone conversation begins?
It turns out that this word, related to telephone, was born much earlier than it. In 1803-1806, the “New Interpreter of Words” was published in St. Petersburg, where it is said about the word “hello”: “It’s a maritime speech, used on a ship, and means: listen. This word is shouted into a megaphone at the ship with which they want to talk, so that they can listen clearly..."
Invention of the telephone
Georgy Chliants
On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), professor of speech organ physiology at Boston University, patented his invention, the telephone, in the United States.
If we talk about the specific goal of the inventor, then it appeared, as they say, by accident. But the very idea of creating a telephone that is familiar to all of us was not born out of nowhere.
In 1860, the teacher of the school for the deaf and dumb in Friedrichsdorf, Philipp Reis (1834-1874, it should be noted that Reis himself, due to a long-term illness, was practically unable to speak) in the old school barn from improvised means (a barrel stopper, a knitting needle, an old broken violin, a coil of insulated wire and a galvanic cell) created an apparatus to demonstrate the principle of the ear.
He called his device a “telephone” and demonstrated it on October 26, 1861 before members of the Frankfurt Physical Society. To be fair, it should be noted that the prototype of his apparatus, the so-called “grumbling wire,” was created 24 years before the Flight by the American scientist from Salem, C. Page.
Reis's electric telephone was not particularly successful. Several semi-ironic and semi-serious articles appeared in print, and the German family magazine "Gartenlaube" described it as a toy in 1863. A skilled mechanic, Albert produced 10-20 Reis phones in different designs, and several of them were even sold. One of the copies ended up at the Scottish University in Edinburgh, where the English-American Alexander Graham Bell was studying at that time.
After getting acquainted with Race's phone, Bell decided to create a device that turns sounds into light signals. He hoped to use it to teach deaf children to speak. Coming from Boston, where the spirit of profit and entrepreneurship reigned, he realized that he had wealth under his feet - he just needed to turn the telephone from a scientific device into a device for practical purposes for a wider range of consumers. Having abandoned the “Race principle”, Bell returned to the foundations of the science of electricity - the works of the Danish physicist Hans Oersted (1771-1851) and the English professor Michael Faraday (1791-1867). True, being already famous and rich, greatly exaggerating, Bell somehow said: “I invented the telephone thanks to my ignorance of electrical engineering. Not a single person with even a basic knowledge of electrical engineering would have ever invented the telephone.” There is a grain of truth in this statement, since his apparatus was unusually simple, and if Bell had followed all the laws of electrical engineering, the design should have been much more complex...
When filing a patent for the telephone, Bell had a “star of luck”: his invention was registered only two hours before another telephone, created on the same principle by Gray (who in 1898 invented an underwater sound alarm system that warned ships about the approach of another vessel so called "Grey's Bell"). The Italian A. Meucci was also unlucky, allegedly who invented the telephone back in 1849, and to the Frenchman C. Boursel, who in 1854 presented a description of a similar invention to his Academy, where it... was lost in the dust.
In the same 1876, Bell's telephone was demonstrated to visitors to the World's Fair in Philadelphia, and in 1881, at the international exhibition in Paris, huge queues lined up for his device.
Obtaining a patent for a telephone was not only the destiny of the inventor. History has preserved this fact. On October 14, 1876, the Postmaster General of Germany and the founder of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), Heinrich Stefan, checked the operation of the Bell telephone in his office. The next day he had the idea to connect it to the telegraph network connecting the post offices of Berlin and Potsdam. To implement his idea, he turned for additional clarification and advice to his friend, the manufacturer Siemens, who immediately requested the German patent office. The response stated that: “... Mr. Bell did not apply for a patent under the name “telephone” in Germany...”. An hour later, Siemens submitted such an application... Soon Siemens factories began supplying the market with tens of thousands of telephone sets patented by him.
First phone line in Europe it connected the Berlin post office with the telegraph on November 5, 1877 (the line length was about 2 km). On January 12, 1881, the first telephone directory was published in Berlin, on two pages of which the names of 48 subscribers were listed.
The world's first telephone line connected the apartment and office of the American businessman Wildis in Boston in 1877, and the first telephone exchange was installed in 1879 in New Haven.
One of the most important inventions for the further improvement of telephones was the creation in 1878 by the English physicist-inventor and music professor David Hughes (1831-1900; in 1855 he received a patent for a direct-printing telegraph apparatus) carbon microphone, which, in turn, used the ideas of the American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931); and Russian scientist M. Michalsky.
The dialer was developed in 1889 by the American Strowger, and the first payphone was demonstrated the following year at the World Exhibition in Paris.
Bibliography
TSB. Ed. 3rd. M., Sov. encyclopedia, 1970. T. 3, p. 114.
Soucek L. To a place where no voice is heard. Prague, 1968. p. 240.
“If I can make the deaf and dumb speak, I can make iron speak,” ; With these words, the American Alexander Bell began his work on creating “talking iron”; phone.
Bell previously worked at a school for the deaf and dumb in Boston. He really taught the deaf and dumb to speak. His father came up with the "visible speech" system. He showed deaf and dumb people who had never heard the sound of human speech how to use their mouth, lips, throat and tongue to make sounds. They imitated talking people and learned to speak.
Alexander Bell took a closer look at all this since childhood. As boys, she and her brother came up with a device that pronounced “ma-ma” as clearly as talking dolls. He knew, perhaps better than anyone else, how the sounds of human speech are produced, how they are carried in the air and how the ear hears them.
It is not surprising that he invented the telephone. But it was unusual that such a famous teacher became fascinated by the idea of a telephone and began studying electricity to make a talking device.
Bell met the inventor of the English telegraph, Wheatstone. He was extremely interested in the telegraph, and even more so in German experiments with a “sounding” plug: a plug through which a current was passed trembled and made a sound.
A plug can make a sound when current passes, so why does a wire only transmit signals with dots and dashes? Is it possible to create a musical telegraph that transmits sounds through a wire?
Bell imagined this telegraph with the same number of notes as a piano. He thought that it would be possible to send several messages simultaneously by playing them in different key tones.
Bell went to work. It no longer seemed enough to him to transmit notes over a wire. He wanted to create such a device that he could speak at one end of the wire and hear at the other, regardless of the distance.
There is nothing strange about this idea for us: we are used to using the telephone.
But Bell's friends found this idea more than strange.
One hot day in June 1876, as Bell was testing one of his many devices, a faint sound came along the wire.
Bell burst into the room from which his assistant was trying to send him signals.
; How did you do that? Don't touch anything, I'll see for myself! - he shouted to the assistant.
Bell worked on the telephone for forty weeks. Finally, an assistant sitting in the basement heard Bell speaking into his device:
; Mr. Watson, come here please. I need you.
The first telephone truly looked like talking hardware. It consisted of a mouthpiece with a small circle of soft iron inserted into it. When they spoke into it, the sound waves set a piece of iron in motion and made it sound. The trembling (vibration) of the iron plate changed the current strength in the wire connecting the mouthpiece to the receiving apparatus at the other end. Here was another disc made of soft iron, which vibrated in exactly the same way as the disc in the outgoing device. His trembling repeated the sounds spoken into the mouthpiece; air waves carried sounds and whole words to the listener's ear.
The device looked as if the first iron circle was listening to words, turning them into electric current and sending them along a wire. The second iron circle received a current and turned it back into zouki, into the same words.
The current phone is built on exactly the same principle. Only the devices for transmitting sound waves to the first record and for transmitting the sound of the second record to the listener’s ear are better designed. This took a lot of work.
The first telephone conversation delighted the inventor. But no one else showed much interest.
A large exhibition was opened in Philadelphia to mark the centenary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A small table in the very corner was set aside for Bell’s invention. Nobody was interested in the phone. Sometimes a visitor to the exhibition would casually glance at the table and allow himself to be shown how the device worked. Everyone thought he was a funny scientific toy. What benefit could it possibly have? Even if words can be transmitted over a wire, who needs it? For what?
Finally, the judges arrived at Bell's table and inspected everything on display. The day was ending. Everyone was hungry and tired from the heat. One of the judges turned the receiver over in his hands and put it on the table, without even bringing it to his ear. Everyone was ready to leave, but suddenly a new visitor attracted attention.
It was Don Pedro, the young Brazilian prince, the most picturesque figure in the entire exhibition. With him is the Empress and a retinue of brightly dressed courtiers.
Don Pedro saw the inventor and hurried to him with loud greetings. Last year he inspected his school for the deaf and dumb in Boston and became very interested in it.
Don Pedro asked what Professor Bell was doing at the exhibition. He showed him his device and handed him one of the tubes. Don Pedro stood with a pipe in his hand, and the retinue and judges looked at him. Bell stepped aside with the receiver and spoke quietly into it.
; My God, she says! ; exclaimed the prince.
The judges came over to also listen to the talking toy. They remained at Bell's desk until late in the evening, listening to each other through wonderful tubes.
The device was taken out of a dark corner and placed in the center of the exhibition so that visitors could see the extraordinary novelty. The phone has received the attention it deserves.
40 years have passed. The aged and famous Alexander Bell sat at a machine that was an exact copy of the first telephone in the attic of a house in Boston.
Bell opened the first telephone line crossing the entire American continent.
Like on an unforgettable day, he said:
; Mr. Watson, come here please. I need you.
Georgy Chliants
On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), professor of speech organ physiology at Boston University, patented his invention, the telephone, in the United States.
If we talk about the specific goal of the inventor, then it appeared, as they say, by accident. But the very idea of creating a telephone that is familiar to all of us was not born out of nowhere.
In 1860, the teacher of the school for the deaf and dumb in Friedrichsdorf, Philipp Reis (1834-1874, it should be noted that Reis himself, due to a long-term illness, was practically unable to speak) in the old school barn from improvised means (a barrel stopper, a knitting needle, an old broken violin, a coil of insulated wire and a galvanic cell) created an apparatus to demonstrate the principle of the ear.
He called his device a “telephone” and demonstrated it on October 26, 1861 before members of the Frankfurt Physical Society. To be fair, it should be noted that the prototype of his apparatus, the so-called “grumbling wire,” was created 24 years before the Flight by the American scientist from Salem, C. Page.
Reis's electric telephone was not particularly successful. Several semi-ironic and semi-serious articles appeared in print, and the German family magazine "Gartenlaube" described it as a toy in 1863. A skilled mechanic, Albert produced 10-20 Reis phones in different designs, and several of them were even sold. One of the copies ended up at the Scottish University in Edinburgh, where the English-American Alexander Graham Bell was studying at that time.
After getting acquainted with Race's phone, Bell decided to create a device that turns sounds into light signals. He hoped to use it to teach deaf children to speak. Coming from Boston, where the spirit of profit and entrepreneurship reigned, he realized that he had wealth under his feet - he just needed to turn the telephone from a scientific device into a device for practical purposes for a wider range of consumers. Having abandoned the “Race principle”, Bell returned to the foundations of the science of electricity - the works of the Danish physicist Hans Oersted (1771-1851) and the English professor Michael Faraday (1791-1867). True, being already famous and rich, greatly exaggerating, Bell somehow said: “I invented the telephone thanks to my ignorance of electrical engineering. Not a single person with even a basic knowledge of electrical engineering would have ever invented the telephone.” There is a grain of truth in this statement, since his apparatus was unusually simple, and if Bell had followed all the laws of electrical engineering, the design should have been much more complex...
When filing a patent for the telephone, Bell had a “star of luck”: his invention was registered only two hours before another telephone, created on the same principle by Gray (who in 1898 invented an underwater sound alarm system that warned ships about the approach of another vessel so called "Grey's Bell"). The Italian A. Meucci, who supposedly invented the telephone back in 1849, and the Frenchman C. Bourcel, who in 1854 presented a description of a similar invention to his Academy, where it... was lost in the dust, were also unlucky.
In the same 1876, Bell's telephone was demonstrated to visitors to the World's Fair in Philadelphia, and in 1881, at the international exhibition in Paris, huge queues lined up for his device.
Obtaining a patent for a telephone was not only the destiny of the inventor. History has preserved this fact. On October 14, 1876, the Postmaster General of Germany and the founder of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), Heinrich Stefan, checked the operation of the Bell telephone in his office. The next day he had the idea to connect it to the telegraph network connecting the post offices of Berlin and Potsdam. To implement his idea, he turned for additional clarification and advice to his friend, the manufacturer Siemens, who immediately requested the German patent office. The response stated that: “... Mr. Bell did not apply for a patent under the name “telephone” in Germany...”. An hour later, Siemens submitted such an application... Soon Siemens factories began supplying the market with tens of thousands of telephone sets patented by him.
The first telephone line in Europe connected the Berlin post office with the telegraph office on November 5, 1877 (the line was about 2 km long). On January 12, 1881, the first telephone directory was published in Berlin, on two pages of which the names of 48 subscribers were listed.
The world's first telephone line connected the apartment and office of the American businessman Wildis in Boston in 1877, and the first telephone exchange was installed in 1879 in New Haven.
One of the most important inventions for the further improvement of telephones was the creation in 1878 by the English physicist-inventor and professor of music David Hughes (1831-1900; in 1855 he received a patent for a direct-printing telegraph apparatus) of a carbon microphone, in which, in turn, , used the ideas of the American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931); and Russian scientist M. Michalsky.
The dialer was developed in 1889 by the American Strowger, and the first payphone was demonstrated the following year at the World Exhibition in Paris.
Bibliography
TSB. Ed. 3rd. M., Sov. encyclopedia, 1970. T. 3, p. 114.