The guy above seems to be smoking some sort of bong made of metal, or is it a canon - but which way does the iron ball come out of? The bearded young man in the B & W picture was actually Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the phone. The bong-like gadget he was holding was a liquid transmitter used to send and receive the first words spoken and heard over the phone: “Mr Watson—Come here—I want to see you.”
“In 1874, telegraph message traffic was rapidly expanding and had become ‘the nervous system of commerce’ in the words of Western Union President William Orton. Orton had contracted with inventors Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to find a way to send multiple telegraph messages on each telegraph line to avoid the great cost of constructing new lines. When Bell mentioned to Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders (parents of two of Bell’s students) that he was working on a method of sending multiple tones on a telegraph wire using a multi-reed device, Hubbard and Sanders began to financially support Bell’s experiments.”
Like Steve Jobs today, Bell had competitors. The most formidable of which was Italian Antonio Meucci, who came out with his own telephone invention years earlier, sadly unpatented. Like the LG Prada, Meucci struggled to be recognized and finally was acknowledged by the US Congress on June 11, 2002. Bell had to fend off several lawsuits to take away his phone patent, won back the patent, used another competitor’s invention, Thomas Edison’s carbon microphone, to amplify voice for long distances and by 1886, a decade after the first phone call was made, sold 150,000 units to consumers. Bell and his group became millionaires - deca-billionaires, translated in today’s money…. And the rest, as they say, is history.
[story taken from wikipedia]
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