". . . rarely have inventor and invention been better served than in this book." – New York Times Book Review Here, Edwin Grosvenor, American Heritage's publisher and Bell's great-grandson, tells the dramatic story of the race to invent the telephone and how Bell's patent for it would become the most valuable ever issued. He also writes of Bell's other extraordinary inventions: the first transmission of sound over light waves, metal detector, first practical phonograph, and early airplanes, including the first to fly in Canada. And he examines Bell's humanitarian efforts, including support for women's suffrage, civil rights, and speeches about what he warned would be a "greenhouse effect" of pollution causing global warming.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone or did he? Inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was also working on a telephone at the same time. Watch Meucci and Bell race to be first to the invention finish line.
The invention of the telephone is a subject of great controversy, central is which is the patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell on March 7, 1876. Many problems and questions surround this patent, not the least of which was its collision in the Patent Office with a strangely similar invention by archrival Elisha Gray. A flood of lawsuits followed the patent's issue; at one point the government attempted to annul Bell's patent and launched an investigation into how it was granted. From court testimony, contemporary accounts, government documents, and the participants' correspondence, a fascinating story emerges. More than just a tale of rivalry between two inventors, it is the story of how a small group of men made Bell's patent the cornerstone for an emerging telephone monopoly. This book recounts the little-known story in full, relying on original documents (most never before published) to preserve the flavor of the debate and provide an authentic account. Among the several appendices is the "lost copy" of Bell's original patent, the document that precipitated the charge of fraud against the Bell Telephone Company.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone during the years of the Industrial Age in Europe and America. It was the day and age for new innovations and new devices that exploded in the field of manufacturing. While many of those instruments were suited for large companies and the wealthy, why not invent devices that everyone could use? This is the story of Alexander Graham Bell, of his telephone and of all the other inventions that sprung from his fruitful mind. Although he worked with the deaf, he never lived in a world of silence, and neither did his hearing-impaired family and friends. Inside you'll read about Budding Inventor A Lovely Wife: A Loving Life Mixing Business with Pleasure And much more!Alexander Graham Bell was a precious young man, and it didn't dismay him that many others, who were older and more experienced than he, were scrambling to build the world's first telephone. There was a stampede to the patent office toward the latter half of the 19th Century. Patent attorneys were shown anything from rough pencil drawings to scribbled out explanations of how these devices were sure to work. Many, many of the applicants presented verbal ideas. Others, though, designed carefully engineered diagrams and prototypes. Only Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, James Watson, had demonstrated it in front of influential scientists and notable statesmen at a University.
This book applies the approach of technology assessment to the telephone. The author's analysis forecasts the effect of the telephone on society and compares it with the reality. This book not only examines the social consequences of the telephone, but provides a model for future efficient assessments of new technologies. It documents a largely unknown piece of the history of American technology and anlayzes the requirements for success in technological forecasting.
Read Ammon Shea's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community. A surprising, lively, and rich history of that ubiquitous doorstop that most of us take for granted. Ammon Shea is not your typical thirtysomething book enthusiast. After reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover (and living to write about it in Reading the OED), what classic, familiar, but little-read book would he turn to next? Yes, the phone book. With his signature combination of humor, curiosity, and passion for combing the dustbins of history, Shea offers readers a guided tour into the surprising, strange, and often hilarious history of the humble phone book. From the first printed version in 1878 (it had fifty listings and no numbers) to the phone book's role in presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings, Senate filibusters, abstract art, subversive poetry, circus sideshows, criminal investigations, mental-health diagnoses, and much more, this surprising volume reveals a rich and colorful story that has never been told-until now.
"In graphic novel format, tells the story of how Alexander Graham Bell came up with the telephone, and how his invention changed the way people communicate"--Provided by publisher.
Alphabetical articles profile the life and work of notable scientists and inventors from antiquity to the present, beginning with Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz and concluding with the Wright Brothers.
The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.
