It’s a Saturday morning. I’m in my bed, snoozing away. All of a sudden, I’m startled and I wake up due to a terrible ringing sound. I pick up the phone with annoyance, and I’m appalled when they ask for an appointment at Chatters hair salon. Turns out it was the wrong number. I grumpily go back to sleep.
When reading that small excerpt, one thing that nobody usually thinks about is the origins of the telephone – one of the great sources of Canadian pride. In 1873, Alexander Graham Bell disclosed the invention of the telephone for the first time – a massive innovation that would change the world as we know it.
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. When visiting North America, Bell’s father discovered its robust environment and decided to move along with his entire family to the USA. Mr. Bell spent his time split between research in the USA and in Canada. He became a Professor of Vocal Physiology in Boston. He avidly studied sounds and how deafness worked, and this lead to the famous experiment that inspired the first practical telephone.
On June 2, 1875, Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson conducted an experiment that involved sound waves when a reed on one end of a line got stuck and could not transmit the current. Watson plucked the reed to fix it, and to Bell’s astonishment, he could hear the plucking sound from his side of the line. This inspired him to look deeper, and he found that by placing the reed in a specialized magnetic field, he would be able to capture and transmit vocal sounds effectively.
He tested the telephone by setting the receivers up in different rooms, linked by a cord, and spoke into it. Bell asked, “Do you understand what I say?” and Watson responded “Yes” in a different room. This was the first successful test of a telephone. Clearly, this model had its limitations, as it was only able to transmit signals short range, and it often broke. Nonetheless, this innovation by a Canadian scientist sent shock waves throughout the world, and the telephone technology from Bell would be improved upon continually to reach the modern day telephone.
When we look around us today, we see the phone in many forms. Although today’s telephones do not even remotely resemble Bell’s original invention, we as Canadians should feel pride in knowing that a Canadian inventor started developing this technology that would go on to revolutionize the world.
This post explored the years 1872-1877 of Canadian history
