Telephone

Everyone is familiar with the childhood game telephone, where a chain of people are ultimately trying to convey a message from the beginning of the line to the end of the line. By the end of the line, the message is so misconstrued that whatever the intended meaning was cannot be interpreted. If a message needed to be conveyed from point A to point B using this method, the world would be in a constant state of confusion and chaos. On March 10th, 1876, a man by the name of Alexander Grahm Bell invented the telephone. Rather than having to convey a message through multiple people, the telephone allowed for instant voice communication from one point to another. The telephone, although a very simple concept, is the most beneficial and important invention of the time and arguably today.
Alexander Grahm Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Communication and speech ran in the family for Alexander, his grandfather and his father were both successful speech experts. Alexander’s mother was deaf which gave him a certain understanding of what it is like to be burdened by a lack of communication. In 1868 he began using his father's models of visible speech to teach deaf students phonetics, a career he resumed after emigrating with his family from Scotland to Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in 1870. (Flynn) The next year he moved to Boston where he met his wife, Mabel Hubbard, at the school Boston School for Deaf Mutes where he taught hearing and speaking impaired students. Bell was “a scientist and author in the field of vocal physiology and elocution”. (Scribner) Alexander was fascinated by what the telegraph did and it inspired him to work on a machine that would transmit not only written messages, but voice over a wire. After years of experimenting, he and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, met with success. Bell's patent application for the telephone was submitted only hours before a rival, Elisha Gray, submitted his version. (Flynn) In 1877, Bell, his...