Now We’re Talking!
On October 9, 1876, the first two-way telephone conversation took place by wire, without the assistance of intermediary telephone operators, between Alexander Bell, a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, and his assistant Thomas Watson, carpenter, machinist, and electric model maker. They spoke to each other for three hours over a wire stretched from 1 Osborne St, Cambridge to 69 Kilby Street, Boston, Massachusetts – a distance of about 5 km (3 mi).
By this date, Bell and Watson had made several public displays of their telephone and its voice communication. By year’s end, demand for long-distance communication and its devices never slowed.
Commemorative plaque on the site of the first 2-way long distance telephone conversation courtesy of the Telephone Pioneers of America.
Bell, an unquenchably curious inventor, explored many scientific questions, assembling laboratory teams, minds and money, to bring useful ideas to life:
– artificial respiration
– desalinization
– flight
– and hydrofoils. If not “a first”, it was “a best” of its day.
His work on the photophone, a system for wireless speech transmission using light, was his personal favourite and surpassed the electric telephone in his estimation.
Part of the patent for Bell’s photophone transmitter … granted over 100 years ago!
Unfortunately, Bell’s vision and theory were ahead of the available materials and technology to make the photophone a reality. It would be decades after Bell’s death that fibre optics could carry secured light transmissions unaffected by cloud cover and other interference.
The voice transmissions that once travelled only by wire have evolved into wireless transmissions… between people on Earth and in space stations and right through to data and video transmissions in deep space between planetary rovers and interstellar probes.
B Bondar / Real World Content Advantage