The Telephone And Its Corporation Essays - Bell System,

The Telephone And Its Corporation The Telephone And Its Corporation The phone is easily one of man's most important, useful and taken for granted inventions. The telephone has outgrown the ridicule with which it first received, now in most places taken for granted, it is a part of many people's daily lives. It marvelously extended the ways man converses that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would live the convenient life. All disadvantage of being deaf and mute to any persons, which was universal before the advent of the telephone, has now happily been overcome. Before I tell of the history of how the telephone was constructed and put in to place I will tell of the past of communications. Ever since the ability of language and written language the most popular form of communication was done through a letter. Others were as documented in 1200 BC in Homer's Illiad were signal fires. Carrier pigeons were used in the Olympic games to send messages from 700 BC to 300 AD. In 1791 the Chappe brothers created the Semaphore system; they were two teens in France who wanted to be able to contact each other from their different school campuses. This system consisted of a pole with movable arms, which the positions took the place of letters of the alphabet. Two years later this idea had caught on and was being used in France, Italy, Russia, and Germany. Two semaphore systems were built in the U.S. in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard; soon Congress was asked to fund a project for a semaphore system running from New York City to New Orleans. Samuel Morse told Congress that not to fund the project because he was developing the electric telegraph. Soon Samuel Morse developed his electric telegraph he demonstrated it in 1844 it caught on and by 1851 51 telegraph companies were in operation. And it continued to grow to 2250 telegraph offices nationwide. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh. He grew up deeply involved in the study of speech due to his father and grandfathers work. He was also a talented musician able to play by ear from a very early age, and, had he not been more interested in what his father was doing to help people speak, he might have ended up as a professional musician. He and his two brothers built a model human skull and filled it with a good enough reproduction of the human vocal apparatus, which worked with a bellows, so it would be able to say, "Ma-ma." Alexander became a Professor and taught visible speech he was greatly appreciated for this. Soon he went to work for Thomas Sanders a successful leather merchant from Salem who had a five-year old deaf son. Sanders also became a friend and admirer of Bell and his work. At his time at the Sanders house he was able to do his experiments in the basement until it became a tad bothersome to Sanders and told him to find a new place to experiment. So Alexander moved his lab to Charles Williams' electrical shop in Boston and employed Thomas Watson together they worked for weeks to figure out this enigma. Finally after tightly tying a copper string and plucking it caused a distinct sound on both ends. He applied for a patent on February 14, 1876 3 hours before Elisha Gray filed a patent for a similar device. March 7, 1876 the patent was issued three days later Alexander spoke the famous words after spilling acid on his pants "Mr. Watson come here I want you!" In order to distribute this new technology to the world and humanity a corporation needed to be created. The business venture to start this new corporation began before the invention with an agreement between Thomas Sanders, Gardiner G. Hubbard, and Bell dated February 27, 1875. Formed as a basis for financing Bell's experiments, the agreement came to be called the Bell Patent Association. The only tangible assets of this association were an early Bell patent, "Improvements in Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraph," his basic telephone patent, No. 174,465, an "Improvement in Telegraphy" (March 7, 1876), and two additional patents that followed. Publicity was needed Hubbard urged Bell to demonstrate his new instrument as well as the further improvements Thomas Watson had produced at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition that summer. It was hot and muggy in Philadelphia and not many people were attracted the complex scientific experiment setup. But Bell had seen an old