The Telephone Jubilee

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 22, 13 December 1929, Page 15

The Telephone Jubilee

A Famous Pioneer -_-- UST fifty years ago the first telephone exchange was opened jn London, It was not avery extensivg affair, as it had only nige subscribers, but it worked, and worked successfully. It was the result of many long and strenuous years of research on the part of Alexander Graham Bell, the pioneer of the telephone. . Some twenty years after his birth in Edinburgh in 1847 Bell emigrated to Canada, and it was‘in this country that he developed the ideas that had: been forming in his mind for some time. His inspiration was directly due to his experience as a teacher of the deaf and dumb. ‘To teach the deaf to hear by means other than the spoken word was the task to which Bell devoted himself, and he spent much time in studying the mechanism of the human voice, Tuning forks were employed in the initial experiments, and Bell succeeded in producing vowel sounds by means of them. Then his mind turned to the use of an electric current, and after many experiments, not all of which ‘were successful, Bell produced a telephone receiver which may be called the prototype of the one in universal use to-day. In its essentials, at least, it was very similar. An interesting point at this stage of the development of the telephone is the fact that Rell’s receiver and transmitter were identical in design. It is well known that it is possible to speak over a short distance using only two receivers joined by a pair of wires, and it was by this method that Bell first succeeded in transmitting messages by wire. His interest . in telephony did not finish after his initial suecess, for he invented what he called the "photophone," an apparatus for transmitting sound by means of light. In connection with this, it is interesting to discover that an apparatus designed for "hearing light and seeing sound" has recently been demonstrated in America. ouenen 4