Here, with the extract of the book THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE by
Herbert N. Casson, we show where moviles, cell phones and pdas began.
In that somewhat distant year 1875, when the telegraph and the Atlantic
cable were the most wonderful things in the world, a tall young
professor of elocution was desperately busy in a noisy machine-shop
that stood in one of the narrow streets of Boston, not far from Scollay
Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor
had forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly
absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude
harmonica with a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most
absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever
been made in any country. The young professor had been toiling over it
for three years and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot
afternoon in June, 1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound--a faint
TWANG--come from the machine itself.
For an instant he was stunned. He had been expecting just such a sound
for several months, but it came so suddenly as to give him the
sensation of surprise. His eyes blazed with delight, and he sprang in a
passion of eagerness to an adjoining room in which stood a young
mechanic who was assisting him.
"Snap that reed again, Watson," cried the apparently irrational young
professor. There was one of the odd-looking machines in each room, so
it appears, and the two were connected by an electric wire. Watson had
snapped the reed on one of the machines and the professor had heard
from the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the
gentle TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the
history of the world that a complete sound had been carried along a
wire, reproduced perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in
acoustics.
That twang of the clock-spring was the first tiny cry of the newborn
telephone, uttered in the clanging din of a machine-shop and happily
heard by a man whose ear had been trained to recognize the strange
voice of the little newcomer. There, amidst flying belts and jarring
wheels, the baby telephone was born, as feeble and helpless as any
other baby, and "with no language but a cry."
The professor-inventor, who had thus rescued the tiny foundling of
science, was a young Scottish American. His name, now known as widely
as the telephone itself, was Alexander Graham Bell. He was a teacher of
acoustics and a student of electricity, possibly the only man in his
generation who was able to focus a knowledge of both subjects upon the
problem of the telephone. To other men that exceedingly faint sound
would have been as inaudible as silence itself; but to Bell it was a
thunder-clap. It was a dream come true. It was an impossible thing
which had in a flash become so easy that he could scarcely believe it.
Here, without the use of a battery, with no more electric current than
that made by a couple of magnets, all the waves of a sound had been
carried along a wire and changed back to sound at the farther end. It
was absurd. It was incredible. It was something which neither wire nor
electricity had been known to do before. But it was true.
No discovery has ever been less accidental. It was the last link of a
long chain of discoveries. It was the result of a persistent and
deliberate search. Already, for half a year or longer, Bell had known
the correct theory of the telephone; but he had not realized that the
feeble undulatory current generated by a magnet was strong enough for
the transmission of speech. He had been taught to undervalue the
incredible efficiency of electricity. Nothing so far to the current
PDAs and cell phones(moviles) that work without plug-in to the socket
and last hours, days and even weeks.
