Inventions of Modern Times

Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone

The United States has produced many inventors, but few as significant as Alexander Graham Bell. Bell's 1876 invention of the telephone revolutionized society. For the first time in history, it became possible to communicate directly and instantaneously across vast distances. A man could speak into a telephone in one place and converse with a woman miles away. Earlier in the Nineteenth Century, the telegraph had made possible a similar change in human interaction. Yet, the telegraph had never allowed for the transmission of act5ual speech. With that invention, one needed to know and understand a special code. One's words were first converted in that code, and then sent across wires in the form of coded electrical impulses; impulses that then had to be "translated" at the other end. What Alexander Graham Bell accomplished was little short of a miracle --...
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