Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 017 1932

graph had by 1866 superseded all others in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey, Russia, Australia, India, South America, Canada and the British provinces and to a large extent in England.

It seems then that in this particular invention the products of the labors of many men were involved. The basic discoveries were made by scientists learned in the phenomena of nature and constantly working with them. So far as I know none of the men making these discoveries profited directly from them. How has it been with later inventions and developments in this same field which has to do with the transmission of intelligence from one person to another?

The telephone or as it was earlier called, the "speaking telephone" was a rather direct outgrowth of the telegraph both technically and psychologically. For no sooner was long distance communication by code an accomplishment than men's imaginations were fired by the thought of sending the voice itself to speak its own message. There was, however, a lapse of some 30 years before dreams were realized. We associate the name of Alexander Graham Bell with the telephone. As a matter of fact the fi rst transmission of the human voice by electrical methods seems to have been carried on by Elisha Gray of Chicago in 1874. And this transmission was by a method virtually the same as the one in use today. In the summer of 1876 Bell of Boston University exhibited an apparatus differing in some details from that of Gray, particularly as regards the method of changing the air pulsations of the voice into electrical pulses. Almost simultaneously with these men, Dolbear of Tuft's College had developed an instrument which closely resembled Bell's, differing only in that he used permanent magnets whereas Bell had used electromagnets. And within a year Edison had applied to the transmitter, which is the part of the telephone into which we speak, a discovery which he had made some years earlier. This was that when two discs of carbon are pressed firmly together a larger current can be made to flow through the connection than if they are loosely in contact. This gave us the telephone in practically 62