When he was eleven, Bell invented a machine that could clean wheat. Bell 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. Although Bell was born in Scotland, he holds two citizenships – Canadian and British. The patent for the telephone was granted to engineer and scientist Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Since it was patented and introduced to the public in June 1876, it has become the world’s most used device.Ģ. The telephone is one of the most important inventions in the world. But in the rumble and clatter of these old machines, you can glimpse a piece of how America got to where we are now - an age of smart phones, TikTok and AI.1. The people working here say there's graceful engineering woven into a lot of these machines, important ideas that were almost lost. "Folks who worked on these systems were highly skilled and highly trained at understanding this complex web of interrelationships." "I fell in love with it because it's a beautiful machine," Autumn says. Like Amstein, Autumn works in Seattle's tech industry.Īsked why she spent hundreds of hours of her spare time bringing this device back to life, she talks about it not like a broken appliance, but like a work of art. "It took me about a year just poking at it before I could even begin to understand it in any real depth." Tremaine Sarah Autumn, a volunteer at the Connections Museum, helped restore the complex panel switch phone system, the last of its kind operational in the world. As Amstein dials a rotary phone, the Strowger switch registers little blips of sound, counts them and makes connections with amazing accuracy. The device whirrs to life, sounding sort of like a drummer tapping out a beat on a cymbal.
"When I pick up the phone here, one of these machines springs into action," he says. Inventors then started coming up with steam age machines that could also listen and make connections much faster.Īmstein demonstrates one of the earliest, most durable devices, known as a Strowger switch, invented in the late 1800s by an undertaker in Kansas City, Mo. Tinkerers find ways to automate a growing system Not practical if you want to connect thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people. "The microphone was here, and she could hear the sound of the bells."Ĭlever but super slow. Tremaine Public pay phones worked on a musical chime system that allowed operators to tell whether you had paid enough money to make your call.Īt first, the technology allowing women to run the network was improvised from stuff inventors found lying around, often as simple as musical chimes or bells.įor the first generation of payphones, for example, women operators listened to musical notes rung by different-sized coins as they were dropped into the slot. "Number please?" she asks, plugging in the cable and causing the phone to ring promptly.
Who invented the first telephone how to#
Once she's ready, he coaches her how to make connections one cable at a time. "Should I gender stereotype you and ask you to be the telephone operator?" Amstein says, inviting a woman visitor to sit at the museum's antique switchboard.
Who invented the first telephone software#
The first step was human operators, usually women, who served sort of as the first software running the system. Once you figure out how to help people talk over long distances, you have to come up with a network that can link a globe of chatterboxes. It turns out that was sort of the easy part. Starting in the 1870s, a group of inventors including Alexander Graham Bell figured out how to translate human voices into electrical signals and shoot them across wires.
"So much of the stuff that I built my whole career on comes out of the telephone system, out of the early developments," Amstein says.Ī voice on a wire, a network connecting a world It's easy to forget how we got here, how the phone system formed our first social network and how its design still shapes how we talk today. These days Americans often connect to other humans through machines and computers, everything from texting to dating apps to Zoom. Tremaine In the age before computers and plastics, America communicated using steam age technology and networking systems worked out by tinkerers.
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