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"Mr. Watson--- come here---I want to see you"
The famous first words ever spoken over the telephone. On March 10, 1876. The telephone is an interesting device. When a person speaks into a phone they create sound waves. An electric current carries these sound waves to the telephone of the person they are talking to. There are two main parts to the telephone: the transmitter and the receiver. The transmitter of the telephone serves as a sensitive "electric ear". The transmitter is behind the mouthpiece of the phone. Each phone has an eardrum, the eardrum of the telephone is a thin, round metal disk, which is called a diaphragm. When a person talks into the telephone, the sound waves strike the diaphragm and make it vibrate. The diaphragm vibrates at various speeds, which is determined by the variations in air pressure, which is caused by varying tones of the speaker's voice. The second part to a phone is the receiver. The receiver serves as an "electric mouth." Like a human voice the telephone has "vocal cords."
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3rd in 1847. He was born in Scotland. His parents names were Alexander Melville and Eliza Grace Symonds. His mother began to lose her hearing when Alexander was 12. Alexander had two brothers that assisted their father in pubic demonstrations in Visible Speech. Alexander also enrolled as a student-teacher at the Weston House. Weston House was a boys' school near Edinburgh where he taught music and speech in exchange for being a student there. One year later he became a full-time teacher at the University of Edinburgh while he studied at the University of London.
Around 1866 Bell started to experiment on how vowel sounds are produced. In 1870 both of his brothers died of tuberculosis and his family moved to Brantford, Ontario in Canada. The next year Graham moved to Boston where he opened a school for teachers of the deaf. He became a professor at Boston University in 1872.
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All picture clips are form the Telephone
History Web Site
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