View full article. In his new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95), Seth Shulman states that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.”. Mr. Shulman sees a similarity between Gray's patent drawing and Bell's later sketch in his notebook and that is proof that Bell …
· BOSTON — A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole …
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· Circumstantial evidence strong that Bell got peek at rival inventor's patent filing for voice transmitter before it was approved.
Melville BellOn March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone. The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf.
Alexander Graham BellAntonio MeucciJohann Philipp ReisJohn PeirceTelephone/Inventors
Answer. Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with being the inventor of the telephone since he was awarded the first successful patent. However, there were many other inventors such as Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci who also developed a talking telegraph. First Bell Telephone, June 1875.
Sir John HaringtonThe first modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by Sir John Harington, an English courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington's device called for a 2-foot-deep oval bowl waterproofed with pitch, resin and wax and fed by water from an upstairs cistern.
John O'SullivanTerence PercivalDiethelm OstryJohn DeaneGraham DanielsWi-Fi/Inventors
The first U.S. patent Issued to Samuel Hopkins for a process of making potash, an ingredient used in fertilizer. President George Washington signed the first patent.
Thomas EdisonIn 1878, Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp and on October 14, 1878, Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights".
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - Lewis Latimer was an American inventor credited with helping to patent the lightbulb and telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell is most well known for inventing the telephone. He came to the U.S as a teacher of the deaf, and conceived the idea of "electronic speech" while visiting his hearing-impaired mother in Canada.
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Mabel had become deaf at age five as a result of a near-fatal bout of scarlet fever. Bell began working with her in 1873, when she was 15 years old.
On 7 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone—but did he invent it?
Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and tutor of deaf children. He had begun electrical experiments in Scotland in 1867 and, after emigrating to Boston, pursued research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph". Bell formed a partnership with two of his students' parents, including prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to help fund his research in exchange for shares of any future profits. He experimented with many different possible transmitters and receivers from 1872 to 1876, created numerous drawings of liquid transmitters, and obtained a patent in 1875 for a primitive fax machine using liquid transmitters, which appear in the published drawings in the U.S. Patent Office.
The theory that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone rests on the similarity between drawings of liquid transmitters in his lab notebook of March 1876 to those of Gray's patent caveat of the previous month.
Bell's drawing for Patent # 161739 ( Fig. 6a) for the fax machine, which he called the "autograph telegraph ", showed multiple liquid transmitters. A detail of this patent drawing ( Fig. 6b) shows two liquid transmitters each marked "Z".
Bell learned acoustics from his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who created diagrams of how the human mouth formed consonants and vowels for his book on Visible Speech . Fig. 2. Bell was aided in his telephone experiments by a thorough understanding of how human speech works.
On November 9, 1874, Bell's friend and neighbor, P.D. Richards, wrote the inventor a letter at Bell's request describing the experiments and transmission of telegraphic messages over wires using a liquid transmitter filled with mercury.
In the winter of 1872-73, after emigrating to Boston, Bell became a professor of elocution at Boston University. He continued research into phonetics and resumed the electrical experiments he had begun in Bath and London towards improving the telegraph. Bell replicated and enlarged upon Helmholtz's tuning fork sounder experiments (see Fig. 3 ). These experiments involved running an electric current through a tuning fork attached to a wire that dipped in liquid as the fork vibrated. The tone of the fork was then replicated in another fork hooked up into the circuit. These experiments, with a vibrating wire touching a liquid, anticipated the liquid transmitter of Bell's telephone in March, 1876 three years later. (Compare Fig. 3 and Fig. 7, for example.)
Bell later recalled that "I commenced the study of Telegraphy with a friend in the city of Bath" in 1867 . He began sending electric currents through tuning forks to transmit sounds through by wire, which he later learned had been anticipated by Helmholtz. "I came to believe firmly in the feasibility of the telegraphic transmission of speech," Bell wrote later, "and I used to tell my friends, that some day or other we should talk by telegraph."
On February 14, 1876, Gray filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office for a telephone design that used a water transmitter. That same morning, Bell's lawyer filed Bell's application with the patent office. There is considerable debate about who arrived first and Gray later challenged the primacy of Bell's patent.
Acting decisively, Alexander Melville Bell asked Bell to arrange for the sale of all the family property, conclude all of his brother's affairs (Bell took over his last student, curing a pronounced lisp), and join his father and mother in setting out for the " New World ".
The Bell family home was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until 1880 when Bell's father-in-law bought a house in Washington, D.C.; in 1882 he bought a home in the same city for Bell's family, so they could be with him while he attended to the numerous court cases involving patent disputes.
These were the first publicly witnessed long-distance telephone calls in the UK.
Continuing his experiments in Brantford, Bell brought home a working model of his telephone. On August 3, 1876, from the telegraph office in Brantford, Ontario, Bell sent a tentative telegram to the village of Mount Pleasant four miles (six kilometres) distant, indicating that he was ready.
On March 10, 1876 Bell used "the instrument" in Boston to call Thomas Watson who was in another room but out of earshot. He said, "Mr. Watson, come here – I want to see you" and Watson soon appeared at his side.
On March 10, 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work, using a liquid transmitter similar to Gray's design. Vibration of the diaphragm caused a needle to vibrate in the water, varying the electrical resistance in the circuit.
Did you know? Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a telephone in his study, fearing it would distract him from his scientific work.
In 1887 , the U.S. government moved to withdraw the patent issued to Bell, but after a series of rulings, the Bell company won in a Supreme Court decision. While the Bell Company faced over 550 court challenges, in the end, none were successful.
The metal detector: Bell initially came up with this device to locate a bullet inside of assassinated President James A. Garfield.
On March 7, 1876, Bell was granted his telephone patent. A few days later, he made the first-ever telephone call to Watson, allegedly uttering the now-famous phrase, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”. By 1877, the Bell Telephone Company, which today is known as AT&T, was created.
Other scientists, including Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray, were working on similar technologies, and there’s some debate over who should be credited with the invention of the telephone.
Telephone. In 1871 , Bell started working on the harmonic telegraph — a device that allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a wire at the same time. While trying to perfect this technology, which was backed by a group of investors, Bell became preoccupied with finding a way to transmit human voice over wires.
While in the U.S., Bell implemented a system his father developed to teach deaf children called “visible speech” — a set of symbols that represented speech sounds.
Patent Office. Bell's patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound" Bell returned to Boston the same day and the next day resumed work, drawing in his notebook a diagram similar to that in Gray's patent caveat.
On March 10, 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work, using a liquid transmitter similar to Gray's design. Vibration of the diaphragm caused a needle to vibrate in the water, varying the electrical resistance in the circuit. When Bell spoke the famous sentence "Mr Watson—Come here—I want to see you" into the liquid transmitter, Watson, listening at the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly.
The patent examiner, Zenas Fisk Wilber, later stated in a sworn affidavit that he was an alcoholic who was much in debt to Bell's lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, with whom he had served in the Civil War. He claimed he showed Gray's patent caveat to Bailey. Wilber also claimed (after Bell arrived in Washington D.C. from Boston) that he showed Gray's caveat to Bell and that Bell paid him $100. Bell claimed they discussed the patent only in general terms, although in a letter to Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details. Bell denied in a sworn affidavit that he ever gave Wilber any money.
Although Bell was, and still is, accused of stealing the telephone from Gray, Bell used Gray's water transmitter design only after Bell's patent was granted and only as a proof of concept scientific experiment to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell's words) could be electrically transmitted. After March 1876, Bell focused on improving the electromagnetic telephone and never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use.
According to historical records, Antonio Meucci, an Italian inventor, actually invented the first telephone in 1860, but he called his invention the “teletrofono.” Although Meucci filed a temporary patent on his idea, he failed to renew his patent. Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham Bell grabbed hold of the idea, obtained a patent and subsequently is now known as the inventor of the telephone.
When you hear the term “penicillin,” you no doubt attribute its invention to Alexander Fleming, who history teaches us came up with the idea of using penicillin to treat illnesses. However, many historians note that evidence indicates that it is difficult to pinpoint who actually came up with the idea of penicillin. North African tribes reportedly used the medicine for thousands of years, and in 1897 penicillum glaucoma was used by Ernest Duchesne to cure typhoid in guinea pigs. Even when Fleming later picked up on the idea of penicillin and worked with it, he stopped working on it and moved on while other scientists eventually mastered it and found a way to mass produce it.
Albert Einstein is another person’s whose idea he is famous for was not really the initial creator of it. Most people associate the theory of relativity with Einstein. However, in all actuality, Henri Poincare was the expert on the theory of relativity and most likely the one who with whom the idea originated. In fact, Poincare published 30 books and more than 500 essays on the theory of relativity before Einstein ever came along. Because the idea wasn’t protected under patent law, however, Einstein was able to lay claim to it by never citing Poincare as a source for his idea.
Although Thomas Edison is still renowned in history books for being the inventor of the light bulb, evidence shows that many other inventors toyed with the idea of the light bulb first. People such as Jean Focault, Humphrey Davy, J.W. Starr and others messed around with the idea. Some historians believe that Heinrich Goebel was actually the first person to have invented the light bulb in 1854. In fact, he tried to sell his invention to Edison, who refused it, but later bought Goebel’s patent for the light bulb after his death.
Many instances exist in which someone’s idea was stolen because it was not properly patented. After learning of some of these real-life instances that led others to surrender the profits from their ideas to others, you might be even more convinced of the necessity of a patent attorney like those found at the Law Office of Jeff Williams.
The courts decided priority in favor of Bell and the telephone company he founded. In addition to being constructed differently from the transmitter described and pictured in Gray's caveat, Bell's working liquid transmitter of March 10, 1876 operated in a way that is in fact described in Bell's original patent application, but not in Gray's caveat.
Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and tutor of deaf children. He had begun electrical experiments in Scotland in 1867 and, after emigrating to Boston from Canada, pursued research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph". Bell formed a partnership wit…
The theory that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone rests on the similarity between drawings of liquid transmitters in his lab notebook of March 1876 to those of Gray's patent caveat of the previous month. However, there is extensive evidence that Bell had been using liquid transmitters in various experiments for over three years before that time. In 1875, Bell filed a patent application for a primitive fax machine which included drawings of multiple liquid t…
In a November 2015 episode of Drunk History, this controversy was reenacted with Martin Starr as Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Winkler as Wilber, and Jason Ritter as Elisha Gray. This reenactment claimed that Alexander Graham Bell definitely stole the necessary knowledge from the examiner Wilber, and that Graham Bell was a villain who stole all of the glory whilst Gray was the real inventor. None of the vagaries of this controversy were discussed in any depth.
• Bell Telephone Memorial
• Marcellus Bailey
• Emile Berliner
• Thomas Edison
• Antonio Meucci
• David A. Hounshell (1975) Elisha Gray And The Telephone: On The Disadvantages Of Being An Expert, Technology and Culture, The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Technology, Vol. 16, No. 2, (April 1975), pp. 133–161. JSTOR Stable URL: 3103488.
• Ralph O. Meyer & Edwin S. Grosvenor (2008) "Did Alexander Graham Bell Steal The Telephone Patent?", American Heritage, Volume 58, Issue 4 (Spring-Summer 2008), Pg. 52.
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.
Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocutionand speech and both his mother and wife were deaf; profoundly influ…
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. The family home was at South Charlotte Street, and has a stone inscription marking it as Alexander Graham Bell's birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell (1845–1870) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–1867), both of whom would die of tuberculosis. His father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, a phonetician, and his mother was Eliza Grace Bell (née Symonds). Born as just "Alexander Bell", at age 10, he …
In 1870, 23-year-old Bell travelled with his parents and his brother's widow, Caroline Margaret Ottaway, to Paris, Ontario, to stay with Thomas Henderson, a Baptist minister and family friend. The Bell family soon purchased a farm of 10.5 acres (42,000 m ) at Tutelo Heights (now called Tutela Heights), near Brantford, Ontario. The property consisted of an orchard, large farmhouse, stable, pigsty, …
Bell's father was invited by Sarah Fuller, principal of the Boston School for Deaf Mutes (which continues today as the public Horace Mann School for the Deaf), in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, to introduce the Visible Speech System by providing training for Fuller's instructors, but he declined the post in favour of his son. Travelling to Boston in April 1871, Bell proved successful in t…
In 1872, Bell became professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston UniversitySchool of Oratory. During this period, he alternated between Boston and Brantford, spending summers in his Canadian home. At Boston University, Bell was "swept up" by the excitement engendered by the many scientists and inventors residing in the city. He continued his research in sound and endeavored to find a way to transmit musical notes and articulate speech, but although absorbe…
By 1874, Bell's initial work on the harmonic telegraph had entered a formative stage, with progress made both at his new Boston "laboratory" (a rented facility) and at his family home in Canada a big success. While working that summer in Brantford, Bell experimented with a "phonautograph", a pen-like machine that could draw shapes of sound waves on smoked glass by tracing their vibration…
On July 11, 1877, a few days after the Bell Telephone Company was established, Bell married Mabel Hubbard (1857–1923) at the Hubbard estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His wedding present to his bride was to turn over 1,487 of his 1,497 shares in the newly formed Bell Telephone Company. Shortly thereafter, the newlyweds embarked on a year-long honeymoon in Europe. During that ex…
Although Alexander Graham Bell is most often associated with the invention of the telephone, his interests were extremely varied. According to one of his biographers, Charlotte Gray, Bell's work ranged "unfettered across the scientific landscape" and he often went to bed voraciously reading the Encyclopædia Britannica, scouring it for new areas of interest. The range of Bell's inventive g…