Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born inventor, invented the telephone in 1876. The instrument looked nothing like today's land line phones and especially foreign from Droids and iPhones.
Bell's telephone looked much like an oddly-shaped victrola without a record platform. His father-in-law, Gardiner G. Hubbard disliked the Western Union company, which at the time delivered telegrams and telegraph messages. Today, it is mostly relegated to wiring money as an alternative to banking. At the time, Western Union was a very powerful company and exerted a virtual monopoly over the newer communications technology of the era. Hubbard wanted to see the monopoly dismantled and the wealthy Boston lawyer eagerly bankrolled Bell's project.
Bell and associate Thomas Watson called their project the 'harmonic telegraph', an idea that a person could transmit their voice through a device they would later patent. On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell 'called' Watson in an adjacent room. He spoke through the mouthpiece of his new device which carried his voice through various wires to an output in Watson's room: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you," Bell reportedly said.
His invention led to the Bell Telephone Company, which later carried the various offshoots BellSouth and BellAtlantic. Today the company is comprised within the Verizon organization. Hubbard was Bell Telephone's first president.
Back to the present day, Alexander Graham Bell's voice was confirmed to be what was heard on an antiquated wax disc at a museum. The National Museum of American History was able to transmit the recording from the mysterious disc donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The disc dated back to 1885. In the way that it becomes more difficult to transmit recordings on older media such as vinyl and 8-track tapes without the replay technology from that time period itself, such as a diamond needle in the case of the LP record, museum officials had to create a three-dimensional reader to duplicate the grooves in the disc and transform them into a readable format.
"Hear my voice-Alexander Graham Bell" the muffled voice says amidst distracting popping and hissing noises like that of an old Ray Conniff record from the 1950's. The Smithsonian was overjoyed when they discovered who was speaking to them: "Identifying the voice of Alexander Graham Bell, the man who brought us everyone else's voice, is a major moment in the study of history," said John Gray, a director at the institution based in the District of Columbia.
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