I probably don’t really need to tell about the importance of the invention of the telephone, nor that it was invented by the Scotsman, Alexander Graham Bell, but I’m going to anyway. I think that the world we living in today is under a constant deluge of inventions, be they revolutionary, evolutionary or just plain weird or useless. I believe that that the telephone is probably the most overlooked invention of them all and here’s how it all started.
At the time that Bell started tinkering with electrical impulses, the telegraph had already been in use for several decades, making communication on a national level completely possible. However, the problem with the telegraph was inherent in its basic use of the binary means of communication of Morse Code. Although binary signals would come in to play a much more significant role in the means of transmitting and encoding information in the mid 20th century, its problem was that, for the average user, it was slow and impractical. The knowledge of Morse Code itself was limited amongst the public, and it was not uncommon to misread or make mistakes when sending or receiving a telegraph. Bell theorised that it would be possible to use the same means as the telegraph to transmit multiple signals simultaneously, as long as each was a different pitch from another. He called this uninvented machine the ‘harmonious telegraph.’ In fact, the whole process of sending electrical impulses used by the telegram was almost there is terms of it becoming the telephone; all it needed was a method of varying the strength of each electrical signal in order for it to transmit the varying tones of a human voice. I won’t talk about it in much more detail here, but the whole story can be read, learned and understood in the Edinburgh Museum, which is accessible from any decent Edinburgh city centre hotel.
Of course, if the history of electronics and telecommunications is really your thing, you might want to consider a visit to Glasgow, with all of the museums being accessible from any good central Glasgow hotel.
Adrian Fisher is a London-based freelance journalist with a mission to
make you a better and happier human being. Drawing attention to the
peculiarities of life in the modern age is all part of the package.
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