{"id":2386,"date":"2021-12-05T21:44:48","date_gmt":"2021-12-05T21:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2386"},"modified":"2021-12-11T22:43:36","modified_gmt":"2021-12-11T22:43:36","slug":"ftv-bell-or-edison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2386","title":{"rendered":"FTV: Bell or Edison?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Speaking strictly from our point of view in the year 2021, given all of the amazing devices we have (literally) at our fingertips, which of the two men mentioned in the title above deserves the highest accolades for influencing our world?\u00a0 Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Alva Edison?\u00a0 Perhaps I can help you make a decision on this question by looking back to the very beginnings – back when these two men were just beginning to transform the old world into a new one.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To discuss Bell, we have to begin a little farther back in time with one Samual Morse; \u00a0 portrait painter, photographer and professor of fine arts.\u00a0 Morse started the ball rolling in terms of long distance communications.\u00a0 After a horrible year in which he lost his wife, father, and mother, he fled to Europe with hopes of achieving enough artistic fame to be awarded the coveted commission to paint a great mural inside the Capitol Dome in Washington.\u00a0 When he learned a rival painter from Italy was chosen for the Capitol work, he decided to accept his artistic failure and return home.\u00a0 Dining nightly aboard the ship <\/span>Sully<\/span><\/i>, he engaged in lively discussions about electricity with a Harvard geologist named Charles Jackson.\u00a0 As they bantered about various tasks that electricity might be harnessed for, one of them made the statement, \u201cIf the presence of electricity can be made<\/span> visible<\/span><\/i> in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by electricity.\u201d\u00a0 The debate over which man had this great epiphany was soon moot.\u00a0 Jackson would later die in an asylum, thus leaving Morse the legacy of what was to come from that statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Samuel Morse spent the next four years experimenting with various \u201cwood-and-brass-and-wire-<\/span>and-mercury devices to do just that:\u00a0 transmit intelligence using electricity.\u00a0 If he could find a way to open and close a circuit in a pattern or sequence representing words or numbers, information could be sent from one device and received by another.\u00a0 At first, the signals were very basic – five clicks represented the number 5 and three clicks, a pause, and four clicks would signify the number 34.\u00a0 These number sequences were printed in identical codebooks used at both ends of the line so simple messages could be sent and decoded.\u00a0 Eventually, a more refined code would be developed offering more speed and detail to the messaging, what we know today as \u2018Morse code\u2019.\u00a0 In elementary school, my brother and a friend who lived across the field north of our house traded Morse Code messages with homemade blinker light devices.\u00a0 His name was Joe Morse so I was vaguely disappointed when I later learned that it was Samuel, not Joe, who invented Morse Code.\u00a0 Known as US Patent No. 1,614 – <\/span>Improvement in the Mode of Communicating Information by Signals by the Application of Electro-Magnetism<\/span><\/i>, some say Morse\u2019s invention patent is\u00a0 \u201cone of the most significant documents in world history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Naturally, it took some time to perfect Morse\u2019s messaging system.\u00a0 The primitive batteries of the day could only send messages short distances at first.\u00a0 Inventors more skilled than Morse helped him improve the distance messages could be sent by linking multiple galvanic cups (a simple type of battery) together, but it was priest turned machinist Alfred Vail who would make transcontinental messaging possible.\u00a0 Vail broke longer circuits into smaller segments with \u2018relays\u2019 – magnetic transmitters that would read a weak signal and then boost it before sending it on to the next relay.\u00a0 Vail\u2019s device was declared to be a \u201ccreative engineering achievement of the first order,\u201d by author Simon Winchester in his 2013 book, <\/span>The Men Who United the States <\/span><\/i>(Harper Perennial).\u00a0 Eventually, Congress passed an appropriation bill (by a narrow 89-83 margin) to invest $30,000 to build a forty-four mile line between Washington and Baltimore – the first electrical engineering project ever undertaken in the United States.\u00a0 The first telegraph message was sent across the system on May 24, 1844:\u00a0 9*#6*)1&9417)*6 comprising the last four words of Numbers 23:23 – \u201c…it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, <\/span>What hath God wrought!<\/span>\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was an explosion of technological advancement that saw major cities linked by telegraph within a few short years.\u00a0 A giant new company called the \u2018New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company\u2019 sought to control the new media.\u00a0 The wordy name was eventually shortened to \u2018Western Union\u2019.\u00a0 With a little more prodding, the politicos passed the Pacific Telegraph Act in 1860 to underwrite the $40,000 needed to take telegraphy coast to coast.\u00a0 The first message was transmitted by President Abraham Lincoln during the first months of the Civil War:\u00a0 \u201cI announce to you that the telegraph to California has this day been completed.\u00a0 May it be a bond of perpetuity between the states of the Atlantic and the Pacific.\u201d\u00a0 It took less than a decade and a half to expand from sending the first Baltimore to Washington message to a transcontinental one capable of transmitting messages coast to coast.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The act of rapidly transmitting information across the country changed the shape of commerce.\u00a0 Winchester says, \u201cIt created a profoundly new epoch in human history.\u00a0 Yet it was quite lacking in intimacy and privacy.\u201d\u00a0 Telegraph instruments were not tools ordinary people could adapt to – most could not read Morse Code so having one set up in the home parlor was not going to happen.\u00a0 The next big revolution in long distance communication would come from the mind of Alexander Graham Bell.\u00a0 A teacher of the deaf (his father, and later his wife, were also afflicted), the idea of the telephone first came to him in 1874.\u00a0 He later wrote that he wondered if, \u201cit would be possible to transmit sounds of any worth if we could only occasion a variation in the intensity of the current exactly like that occurring in the density of air while a given sound is made.\u201d\u00a0 Joseph Henry, at the time the head of the Smithsonian Institution and one of the greatest electrical engineers in America, told Bell, \u201cYou have the germ of a great invention.\u201d\u00a0 Bell claimed he did not have the skill to make it work to which Henry told him bluntly, \u201cGet it!\u201d\u00a0 Less than two years later, he was awarded US Patent No. 174-465, \u201c<\/span>for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically \u2026 by causing electrical undulations similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds.<\/span><\/i>\u201d\u00a0 The most famous test of this newfangled idea took place just weeks before the patent was awarded.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Naturally, there were months of experimentation leading up to Bell filing for a patent.\u00a0 He had conducted some of his work in a dank basement in Salem where the witches\u2019 trials had taken place in colonial days.\u00a0 In early 1875, he moved into a shop attic on Court Street in Boston whose owner routinely supplied his upstairs tenants with assistants.\u00a0 The helper assigned to assist Bell was to become his decades long companion and assistant was named Thomas Watson.\u00a0 It was Watson who was testing three vibrating reeds as a means to send multiple signals down a single telegraph line when one of them stuck to the device\u2019s magnet.\u00a0 When he pulled it free, Bell was in the next room and heard the \u2018twang\u2019 transmitted to his own receiver.\u00a0 In Winchester\u2019s account, \u201c[Bell] realized the vibration had induced a tiny electric current that had traveled from one room to the next by wire and had made the reeds on Bell\u2019s magnets twang at the same frequency.\u00a0 He bent his languid frame over the instrument and cupped his ear:\u00a0 there was no doubt about it.\u00a0 Sound was being sent and received where only symbols had gone before.\u201d\u00a0 Bell had found a way to send \u201cvibrations through the air.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bell and Watson worked to refine their instruments so exact frequencies and timbres could be sent along the wire and recognized on the receiver\u2019s end.\u00a0 With a speaking tube attached to his instrument, Bell was adjusting the resistance of the circuits to replicate the sound produced by the vibrations.\u00a0 Needing his assistant\u2019s help, he spoke into his speaking tube, \u201cMr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you.\u201d\u00a0 Thomas Watson came on the run and exclaimed, \u201c I could hear you.\u00a0 I heard what you said.\u201d\u00a0 The first intelligible telephone message was made on March 10, 1876.\u00a0 It was a moment Bell could still recall vividly some forty years later when making another test.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By the first decade of the 1900s,\u00a0 telephones were wildly popular with millions already in use across the United States.\u00a0 The first transcontinental telephone line was strung and Bell was in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Manhattan ready to test the connection on January 25, 1915.\u00a0 Three thousand miles away, Watson was in the Bell Building in San Francisco.\u00a0 When Watson picked up his telephone, there was dead silence followed by a click and a faint electrical buzz.\u00a0 Out of the earpiece he heard Bell:\u00a0 \u201cHello, Mr. Watson.\u00a0 Can you hear me?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI can hear you perfectly,\u201d Watson replied.\u00a0 Surely with a smile on his face, Bell continued, \u201cMr. Watson – come here, I want you.\u201d\u00a0 Watson himself smiled at the memory of their historic first call and said, \u201cI could – but this time it would take me a week to get to you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ontonagon has a place in the story of the telephone story.\u00a0 As told in <\/span>This Land, The Ontonagon<\/span><\/i> (Bruce Johanson – Ralph W. Secord Press – 1985), Rockland business man Linus Stannard traveled to see the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876.\u00a0 According to Johanson, \u201cStannard attended scientific lectures and exhibits . . . One such exhibit drew his special interest.\u00a0 A bearded, portly man whom some regarded as a crackpot, while others regarded him as a gifted teacher of the deaf, was lecturing on a device that would transmit a human voice over a wire!\u00a0 Having had to deliver messages on horseback or on foot, the man from Rockland saw immediately the usefulness of such a device in an isolated area such as the Ontonagon Country.\u00a0 The following day, Stannard witnessed an actual demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell\u2019s invention and was now convinced of its great potential in the Ontonagon Country.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Stannard returned home and his descriptions of this new invention spread his enthusiasm about it to Ben Chynoweth of Rockland, Lawrence Collins of Greenland, and James Mercer of Ontonagon.\u00a0 By 1877, there were three telephones operating in Rockland – one at Stannard\u2019s home, one at his store and the other at Chynoweth\u2019s home.\u00a0 By the end of winter, Mercer had wires strung on cedar posts to his home on the outskirts of Ontonagon and to the Mercer Dock at the mouth of the Ontonagon River.\u00a0 Collins also wanted to be connected and had wires strung from Rockland to his store in Greenland.\u00a0 Some in Ontonagon called it \u201cMercer\u2019s Folly,\u201d but the four applied for and received the first charter for a telephone system in the State of Michigan.\u00a0 The company was named the Ontonagon Telegraph Company and George Stannard, Linus\u2019 son, became the president.\u00a0 Let us also not forget the demand for copper generated by the emergence of this new mode of communication.\u00a0 Ontonagon County was not only on the ground floor of the Bell revolution, but also knee deep in supplying the country\u2019s growing demand for the copper needed to produce the devices everyone would soon be clamouring for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The telephone business would make Bell and his heirs very rich.\u00a0 Western Union made a monumental mistake when they turned down a chance to invest in the company and (as they characterized it) \u2018Bell\u2019s toy.\u2019\u00a0 Realizing their mistake, Western Union later offered $25 million for the patent rights but it was too little, too late.\u00a0 By the time Bell died in Nova Scotia on August 2, 1922, there were thirteen million telephones in the United States alone.\u00a0 Telephones now outnumber people in America, yet there are billions worldwide who do not have access to the telephone (or for that matter, clean water and basic sanitation facilities which are also lacking for many).\u00a0 With that said, it should also be noted there are now more than six billion cell phones in the world and even in places lacking other \u2018basics\u2019, the realm of long-distance communication has become yet another one of those \u2018basic human rights\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bell\u2019s US Patent No. 174-465 is said by some to be the most valuable patent ever awarded.\u00a0 Morse\u2019s Patent 1,647, it was said, \u201ccaused the old world to be tossed into the ashcan and a new one to be born.\u201d\u00a0 The same might be said about the telephone, but it took many years for some (like Midwestern farmers) to stop thinking of a telephone as an instrument that only brought bad news, oftentimes in the middle of the night.\u00a0 Regardless, the rapid acceptance of the telephone as a \u201cdevice with lasting commercial class and mercantile clout\u201d was unstoppable.\u00a0 As Winchester sees it, \u201cAlexander Graham Bell has long been regarded fondly as the archbishop of the capitalist cathedral, especially by the millions around the country who were prudent or prescient enough to own telephone shares.\u201d\u00a0 As the glum Western Union chiefs must have said to themselves a year after they turned down a chance to invest in the Bell operation, \u201c<\/span>Some toy!\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We have now made the case whether or not Alexander Graham Bell deserves to be held in the highest regard for influencing our world.\u00a0 In Part 2 of <\/span>Bell or Edison?<\/span><\/i>, we will make the case for Thomas Alva Edison\u2019s place in the pantheon of those who helped shape our modern world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Telephone you say?\u00a0 Jeff Lynn and ELO had something to say about the subject!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Speaking strictly from our point of view in the year 2021, given all of the amazing devices we have (literally) at our fingertips, which of the two men mentioned in the title above deserves the highest accolades for influencing our world?\u00a0 Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Alva Edison?\u00a0 Perhaps I can help you make a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2386"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2394,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions\/2394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}