History Book: Bell’s bold connection

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. 

Up next, how telephones got their start, and the technology that made them possible.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher visited the Asheville Radio Museum in North Carolina, where she spoke with tour guide and radio enthusiast Stuart Smolkin about the science that helped shape the modern world.

STUART SMOLKIN: Do you use Bluetooth? That's radio. Do you have a wireless internet router at home? That's radio. Do you have a wireless remote for opening your car door? That's radio.

EMMA EICHER: The shelves surrounding Stuart Smolkin are filled with old technology: candlestick telephones, woodcarved radios, boxy computers, and electrical telegraphs, like this one:

SOUND: [MORSE CODE CLICKS]

Smolkin says telecommunications using radio waves changed the world.

It all began in 1831, when scientist Michael Faraday discovered changing magnetic fields can induce electric currents. That led to widespread use of electric telegraphs, which was a way to send messages over wires using electrical pulses.

They used Morse code to do it. 

SMOLKIN: You had to be able to convert the dots and dashes into a message.

But telegraphy was expensive, since copper wires had to be manually placed between towns. And messages had to be short.

In the mid-1800s, scientists raced to find a better way to communicate.

SMOLKIN: So Alexander Graham Bell got interested in the idea of, could you somehow send multiple messages at the same time?

Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell wondered how to harness these electromagnetic fields.

SMOLKIN: He then got the idea that okay, you could use sound waves to operate something mechanically.

And Bell thought he could figure out a way to replicate voice over the wires. So he teamed up with engineers to make it possible. 

His invention used a transmitter attached to an electric wire. It functioned like a human diaphragm. A drum vibrated when a voice spoke into it, and then those vibrations traveled across the wire to the receiver, where it recreated the sound.

SMOLKIN: And on the other end would be an electromagnet that received the electrical signal that now replicated the voice, and it would operate in the opposite way to cause a diaphragm to vibrate, which would create sound that you could hear.

150 years ago in February, Bell seemed to be the first to the finish line and filed a patent for the first telephone. But a rival named Elisha Gray also submitted a similar patent on the same day.

That launched a debate on intellectual property rights.

About a month later, on March 7th, Bell won the patent, based on old drawings that proved he invented it first.

SMOLKIN: The patent was awarded based on who got the idea first, not who filed first.

But things turned ugly: the Western Union telegraph company filed a lawsuit to challenge Bell’s patent. They wanted to bury Bell’s fledgling telephone business, fearing the competition.

The litigation climbed all the way to the Supreme Court in the so-called Telephone Cases of 1888.

SMOLKIN: And then I think the icing on the cake was when expert testimony claimed that what Gray had was not only different, but would never work.

So Bell won the patent war. And his telephone reinvented the communications industry.

One of the earliest telephones was the “candlestick” phone. The mouthpiece is fitted at the top of the stand, and a separate receiver is held to the ear.

AUDIO: Press room, huh? Wait a minute. Hello, Sarge …

Candlestick phones are all over the newsroom in the 1940 hit film, His Girl Friday.

And at the sheriff’s station in the 1960 sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. Barney Fife used one to ring up his sweetheart.

BARNEY FIFE: Juanita, Juanita, lovely dear Juanite. From your head down to your feet, there is nothing half so sweet!

Bell’s company, American Telephone and Telegraph, eventually pushed Western Union out of the telephone business. This was the same telegraph giant that once tried to ruin Bell. 

Bell would go on to dominate American telecommunications for most of the 20th century as AT&T.

AT&T pioneered the idea of using radio waves to create wireless telephones. Using its groundbreaking research, scientists eventually invented broadcast radio in the 1900s.

SMOLKIN: You started out with just telegraphy, and then you got wireless telegraphy, and then you got radio that could send wireless telegraphy, and the ability to send voice and music. So you put this all together, and that's really how radio communications got started.

And it didn’t stop there. The first television sets in the ‘20s used radio waves along with complex mechanical systems.

SMOLKIN: Black and white picture is transmitted the same way voice is transmitted.

Bell’s telephone paved the way for the technology of the future.

SMOLKIN: All the things we depend on are... basically, the foundation was radio.

SOUND: [RADIO STATIC]

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

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