Can modern sound media really transmit the human voice across long distances? The answer to this question is less straightforward than you might think, and I’ve rarely seen it addressed more earnestly and thoroughly than in a sequence of twelve essays from the 1880s debating the question of whether Catholic priests could use the telephone…
Historians of audio technology like to claim that Philipp Reis’s telephone of 1861 couldn’t have transmitted intelligible speech in the way he described it working, even if it might have done so in another way. But how would speech come out, I wondered, if it were sent over a system working exactly on the terms…
In case you didn’t know, Philipp Reis invented an electric telephone in 1861. The big question has always been, as Silvanus Thompson puts it in an exhaustively researched biography published in 1883, “not whether Reis invented a telephone—that is not denied—but whether he invented the Telephone” (p. 36). The title of Thompson’s book is Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone,…
During 1901 and 1902, a story circulated in newspapers around the United States and beyond in which a couple whose wedding plans had been dashed when the bride was placed under quarantine went ahead and got married by phonograph, with the bride and groom speaking their parts of the ceremony separately. This story was usually…
A forgotten North Carolina inventor named James Davis seems to have played a significant role in the early history of sound recording, but it’s tantalizingly unclear just what that role was. My interest in Davis was sparked by a historical essay on the telephone published in the London Electrician in 1883. The author of this…
On August 2, 1948, listeners to WTHT in Hartford, Connecticut, got to hear a conversation carried out by mobile telephone between the radio studio and a car speeding down a highway. I’m now pleased to share the audio of that historic broadcast, which might be the oldest recording of a real mobile phone conversation—one that…
I’ve never been into the debates over who invented the telephone. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion. It’s just that I don’t find the question of credit for the invention all that interesting, especially when it turns into a zero-sum game, a picking of sides, a competition where making a case for one…
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