The human voice couldn’t create enough power to make telephones practical a call of over a few miles was impossible, even with stronger magnets. In other Bell models, the transmitter was dropped and the whole thing was powered by the voice of the person using the phone (through weak electromagnetic power created through the use of magnets). The rod would move up and down in a cup of electrified acid water (this is why you had to speak downward into the device spills would be very bad!), changing the resistance, and thus sending a variable current out through a wire to a receiver on the other end. In some models the membrane was further attached to a steel rod, which would be pushed down (and pulled up) by the vibrations. You would speak downward into a tube this would cause a membrane (a small disk made of metal) to move and vibrate according to the intensity of the sounds in your voice. The first working telephones using this principle used a liquid to create the variable resistance. It took him two years to put this idea into practice, but it became the founding principle of telephony. He thought that, just maybe, by using a membrane to convert sounds of varying intensity into electrical current of varying intensity (instead of just the working of a lever), and then reversing the process on the other end with another membrane, he could replicate speech over long distances. This in turn caused a lever attached to the ear to “write” a wave pattern on smoked glass-bigger waves for louder sounds and smaller for quieter sounds. (It is not recorded just where the ear came from, volunteered or otherwise.) Speaking into the device caused the ear to operate, well, like an ear: The ear’s membrane vibrated according to the intensity of the voice, more for louder voices or sounds, less for quieter sounds or whispers. In 1874, while Alexander Graham Bell (who considered himself to be a teacher of the deaf, more than the inventor of the telephone) was working on the harmonic telegraph, the telephone, and hearing aids for the deaf, he built a device called a phonoautograph, made with Frankensteinian ingenuity out of a dead man’s ear. The key is something called “variable resistance.” Inspired by a Dead Man’s Ear Sure, the trappings are different we use computers instead of operators, air instead of wires to transmit our voices, but the premise behind all of it is the same-so much so, in fact, that you could hook up a phone from the early 1900s to your wall and still get it to work!Ī basic phone consists of a microphone (which you talk into), an apparatus to change your voice into electric signals, a means of sending the signals to their destination (say, your friend’s ear), and (on your friend’s end) a receiver which then changes the electric signals back into your voice (or an approximation thereof).īut how on earth does your voice get changed into electricity? This is really the heart of the matter, for once you can change your voice into electric current and then change it back again, you’ve got it made (you just need wires or some medium to transmit the electricity). After all, the phones of today work the same way as Bell’s and all the phones of yesteryear. “Hey! Is this thing on?!”īefore diving into the workings of the very earliest phones, let’s talk about how they work in general. Watson, come here! I want you!”) was spoken over an electric telephone, on Ma(THG file photo). Liquid transmitter, over which the first articulate sentence (“Mr. Donate to the Connections Museum Seattle.Visiting the Connections Museum Seattle.
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