1874 It was another tough night. I do experiments at night working in my workshop whatever happens. I try not to skip even a day. I tried converting music into electrical signal. Allowed electrical signals can already be sent from electrical clicks. There is an electrical telegraph line that does that. What I want to do is to transmit human speech instead of clicks. I am reading a book of Hermann von Helmholtz. The book is in German. I really don’t know any German and I wasn’t able to find anyone who could translate it to English. So I am trying to understand the book just looking at the diagrams in it. As I understood, Helmholtz was able to convert all the sound of speech to electricity. I have made some serious progress since I started my experiments 2 years ago. 1875 Today my attorney started his journey to UK. I decided on getting the patent first from UK as they don’t give a patent if it has been already taken in any other country. We are still trying to make it work with Thomas Watson. I am glad I hired him. He is worth all his money. He is a lot more than a skilled electrical engineer to me. He is a smart man and a good friend you can trust. I have some issues with Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders. I am glad they are supporting me with money but they think I should get faster. They threaten me with cutting my payment. I don’t think they acknowledge what a great invention I am working on. If I don’t offer them something soon, I fear that Hubbard might take away my attorney Anthony too. Talking about my works, I have found that human speech came in wave like patterns. I now hope to produce an electrical wave that would follow the same patterns as someone’s speech. March 1876 And that was the last of them, 599th lawsuit. I can finally rest peacefully in my bed knowing that I proved that I am the legally acknowledged inventor of the telephone. It was two weeks ago when I finally got my product working. Getting the patent was not so easy in US. All thanks to Gray. If he didn't claim that he has invented the telephone. Hence Gray made a water based variable resistor. But my design is very different. In my design the transmitter, the liquid resistor transfers to an electric circuit, the vibrations of a needle attached to a diaphragm which has been made to vibrate by sound. The electrical resistance of the circuit changes in tandem with the needle’s position in the liquid, and so sound is converted into an equivalent electrical signal. The receiver converts the electrical signal back into sound using a vibrating needle in liquid connected to a diaphragm which vibrates to recreate the sound that has been transmitted. He just created a little piece which he claims is the same as I use- which is not- and using this claimed that he invented the phone. It was ridiculous, such a waste of time for both of us. |
Inventor of the Phone Alexander Graham Bell |
Journals 7-9 |