This is all the picture of me that i can find
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
10:12 AM
Unknown
5. View Selection, One At A Time
Often in designing a layout you need to check how an element looks exactly by its own or by few elements, for example in website layout below, I want to check slider’s buttons to confirm that they do not have transparency so they look exactly the same with or without slider’s image.
In past I have to turn off the visibility of slider image’s layer, slider background’s layer and even content’s background layer, but now I can just simply hold down the Alt key, then click on the ‘eye’ icon beside the button group to turn off all layers’ visibility so that I only view those buttons. After I checked them, I can just repeat the trick again to bring all layers’ visbilibity back.
This trick is also extremely useful while it comes to image slicing. You want to slice slider’s button without any other element like slider image, so you can use this trick to turn off all layer’s visibility to just slice the button, then repeat the trick to recover all layer’s visibility so it saves a lot of time wasted on turn on and off layers’ visibility.
10:12 AM
Unknown
4. Customize Font’s Tracking, Anytime
This particular tip shows you how to increase the font’s tracking in certain part of the type easily, so it might only be used on certain specific situation like logo or button creation, but it’s a professional tip that can save lots of time on finding fonts with suitable typography for your logo or button creation.
Alright, let’s say I want to decrease the tracking of the type, ’360′ so my logo’s type looks unique that visitor remembers it easier. I can select ‘POLO360′ by using Type tool which can be activated by pressing T key, then hold down the Alt and press < button to start decreasing the type’s tracking, which will bring the result above.
You can use this trick to tackle tracking issue of some artistic fonts, so there’s no worries about tracking next time you want to find graphical fonts for your logo creation!
10:11 AM
Unknown
3. Instant Layer Selection = Win
Layout design is an exhausting job as we have to tackle lots of issues such as typography, spacing and graphic, but it will be overwhelming if we want to find a specific element’s layer from hundreds of layers.
Let this trick makes your designer’s life easier. Activate the Move tool using V key and hold down the Ctrl key, then click on the element and you will automatically select the element’s layer. It’s really that simple but keep in mind that if you put elements into a group, then by using the same trick you will be selecting the group’s folder that contains the element you clicked, as shown above
10:09 AM
Unknown
2. Smart Object For Smart Designer
Just as its name, Smart Object makes your editing smarter by carrying out 2 primary functions: perform nondestructive transforms and perform filtering. This feature comes in very handy especially when you’re producing a site layout with heavy graphics like stock photos, social media icons and UI kits, and all you need to do is right click a layer, then click ‘Convert to Smart Object’ to enjoy its benefits.The first function says that once a layer is converted into a Smart Object, you can transform it anyway you want without losing its original quality. In our case we want to make the image slider smaller so we convert image slider’s layers to Smart Object and transformed it into something smaller.
Ouch, it’s just too small so I decided to change it back.
Looks like everything’s okay and nothing happened right? Below is the result if you applied a backward transformation without converting layer to Smart Object.
So you can probably see the difference here, especially slider’s buttons part. The backward transformation without Smart Object applied on layers makes the slider and slider’s buttons lose their quality. So by converting a layer to Smart Object, you can transform it to any smaller size you want but once you regretted about your decision, you can change it back without losing quality.
Another benefit by converting layer into Smart Object is once you applied filter on a Smart Object, a filter’s layer will appear under the Smart Object’s layer so you can disable filter easier by just turn off the visibility of the filter’s layer, and that’s called nondestructive filtering, great time saver for your project.
10:07 AM
Unknown
1. A Snapshot Of Beautiful Past
Now you learned how to undo multiple times, copy layer styles, faster layer selection and using Smart object these great time saving tips. Well, these are really handy skills that greatly boosts your productivity but how about after 2 hour’s work, you regretted your editing and decided to start from the middle? Redo it completely will be very exhausting and boring even you applied all killer tips you learned before, so that’s when Snapshot kicks in.
Snapshot allows you to create a temporary copy of any state of your editing so when you have trouble on improving your design and decided to go back, you can simply click on a snapshot to bring you back to the state you desired. To take a snapshot, you just have to open History palette, and click on the 2nd icon you see on the bottom of the palette.
There are also some useful features for snapshot like you can take multiple snapshots so you have more choices and you can name them so you remember them easier. Ultimately you can also use these snapshots to compare different effects you created for your design.
However, be sure to remember that once you closed the document, snapshots will be deleted instantly so if you want to keep those states, you can click on each snapshot and save the document as another file.
10:03 AM
Unknown
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird FRSE (14 August 1888 – 14 June 1946)[2] was a Scottish engineer and Inventor of the world's first television, and also the world's first color television. he is often referred to as "The father of television." Although Baird's original electromechanical design was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems, he is still credited with the invention of the world's first fully electronic color television [3] which would eventually become standard.Baird's early successes demonstrating working television broadcasts and his color and cinema television work earn him a prominent place in television's history. In 2002, Baird was ranked number 44 in the BBC's list of the "100 Greatest Britons" following a UK-wide vote.[4] In 2006, Logie Baird was also named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history, having been listed in the National Library of Scotland's 'Scottish Science Hall of Fame'.[5][6] The "Baird" brand name was first owned by Thorn-EMI and is now owned and used by the Brighthouse retail chain in the UK as a brand name for its televisions.
Early years
Baird was born at 8am in Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute (then Dunbartonshire) on 13 August 1888, the youngest of four children of the Reverend John Baird, the Church of Scotland's minister for the local St Bride's church and Jessie Morrison Inglis, the orphaned niece of a wealthy family of shipbuilders from Glasgow.[7]He was educated at Larchfield Academy (now part of Lomond School) in Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College (which later became the University of Strathclyde); and the University of Glasgow. His degree course was interrupted by World War I and he never returned to graduate.
Television experiments
Between 1902 and 1907, Arthur Korn invented and built the first successful signal-conditioning circuits for image transmission. The circuits overcame the image-destroying lag effect that is part of selenium photocells. Korn's compensation circuit allowed him to send still pictures by telephone or wireless between countries and even over oceans, while his circuit operated without benefit of electronic amplification.[8] Korn's success at transmitting halftone still images suggested that such compensation circuits might work in television. Baird was the direct beneficiary of Korn's research and success.[9][10]
In his first attempts to develop a working television system, Baird experimented with the Nipkow disk. Paul Nipkow had invented this scanning disc system in 1884.[11] Television historian Albert Abramson calls Nipkow's patent "the master television patent".[12] Nipkow's work is important because Baird and many others chose to develop it into a broadcast medium.
In early 1923, and in poor health, Baird moved to 21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, on the south coast of England and later rented a workshop in Queen's Arcade in the town. Baird built what was to become the world's first working television set using items including an old hatbox and a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue that he purchased.[13] In February 1924, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock, but survived with only a burnt hand. His landlord, Mr Tree, asked him to quit his workshop and he moved to upstairs rooms in Soho, London, where he made a technical breakthrough. Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television at Selfridges department store in London in a three-week series of demonstrations beginning on 25 March 1925.
In his laboratory on 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second.[14] Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.[15] Looking for publicity, Baird visited the Daily Express newspaper to promote his invention. The news editor was terrified: he was quoted by one of his staff as saying: "For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him."[16]
First public demonstrations
On 26 January 1926, Baird repeated the transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London.[17] By this time, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could broadcast live moving images with tone graduation.He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on 3 July 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary colour; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television.[18]
In 1932, Baird was the first person in Britain to demonstrate ultra-short wave transmission. (Today, we refer to "ultra short waves" as the VHF band.) Contrary to some reports, these transmissions were far from the first VHF telecasts. In 1931, the US Federal Radio Commission allocated VHF television bands. From 1931 to 1933, station W9XD in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, transmitted some of the first VHF television signals. The station's 45-line, triply interlaced pictures used the U. A. Sanabria television technology.[19]
Broadcasting
In 1927, Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow; Baird transmitted the world's first long-distance television pictures to the Central Hotel at Glasgow Central Station.[20] This transmission was Baird's response to a 225-mile, long-distance telecast between stations of AT&T Bell Labs. The Bell stations were in New York and Washington, DC. The earlier telecast took place in April 1927, a month before Baird's demonstration.[12]Baird then set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and the first television programme for the BBC. In November 1929, Baird and Bernard Natan established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. He televised the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby in 1931. He demonstrated a theatre television system, with a screen two feet by five feet (60 cm by 150 cm), in 1930 at the London Coliseum, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm.[21] By 1939 he had improved his theatre projection system to televise a boxing match on a screen 15 ft (4.6 m) by 12 ft (3.7 m).[22]
From 1929 to 1932, the BBC transmitters were used to broadcast television programmes using the 30-line Baird system, and from 1932 to 1935, the BBC also produced the programmes in their own studio at 16 Portland Place. On 3 November 1936, from Alexandra Palace located on the high ground of the north London ridge, the BBC began alternating Baird 240-line transmissions with EMI's electronic scanning system which had recently been improved to 405 lines after a merger with Marconi. The Baird system at the time involved an intermediate film process, where footage was shot on cinefilm which was rapidly developed and scanned. The trial was due to last 6 months but the BBC ceased broadcasts with the Baird system in February 1937, due in part to a disastrous fire in the Baird facilities at Crystal Palace. It was becoming apparent to the BBC that the Baird system would ultimately fail due in large part to the lack of mobility of the Baird system's cameras, with their developer tanks, hoses, and cables.[23]
Baird's television systems were replaced by the electronic television system developed by the newly formed company EMI-Marconi under Isaac Shoenberg, which had access to patents developed by Vladimir Zworykin and RCA. Similarly, Philo T. Farnsworth's electronic "Image Dissector" camera was available to Baird's company via a patent-sharing agreement. However, the Image Dissector camera was found to be lacking in light sensitivity, requiring excessive levels of illumination. Baird used the Farnsworth tubes instead to scan cinefilm, in which capacity they proved serviceable though prone to dropouts and other problems. Farnsworth himself came to London to Baird's Crystal Palace laboratories in 1936, but was unable to fully solve the problem; the fire that burned Crystal Palace to the ground later that year further hampered the Baird company's ability to compete.[24]
Baird made many contributions to the field of electronic television after mechanical systems had taken a back seat. In 1939, he showed colour television using a cathode ray tube in front of which revolved a disc fitted with colour filters, a method taken up by CBS and RCA in the United States. In 1941, he patented and demonstrated a system of three-dimensional television at a definition of 500 lines. On 16 August 1944, he gave the world's first demonstration of a fully electronic colour television display. His 600-line colour system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture.[25][26] In 1943, the Hankey Committee was appointed to oversee the resumption of television broadcasts after the war. Baird persuaded them to make plans to adopt his proposed 1000-line Telechrome electronic colour system as the new post-war broadcast standard. The picture quality on this system would have been comparable to today's HDTV (High Definition Television). The Hankey Committee's plan lost all momentum partly due to the challenges of postwar reconstruction. The monochrome 405-line standard remained in place until 1985 in some areas, and it was three decades until the introduction of the 625-line system in 1964 and (PAL) colour in 1967. A demonstration of large screen three-dimensional television by the BBC was reported in March 2008, over 60 years after Baird's demonstration.
Other inventions
Some of Baird's early inventions were not fully successful. In his twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow's electricity supply. Later Baird invented a glass razor which was rust-resistant, but shattered. Inspired by pneumatic tyres he attempted to make pneumatic shoes, but his prototype contained semi-inflated balloons which burst. He also invented a thermal undersock (the Baird undersock), which was moderately successful. Baird suffered from cold feet, and after a number of trials, he found that an extra layer of cotton inside the sock provided warmth.[13]Baird's numerous other developments demonstrated his particular talent at invention. He was a visionary and began to dabble with electricity. In 1928, he developed an early video recording device, which he dubbed Phonovision. The system consisted of a large Nipkow disk attached by a mechanical linkage to a conventional 78-rpm record-cutting lathe. The result was a disc that could record and play back a 30-line video signal. Technical difficulties with the system prevented its further development, but some of the original phonodiscs have been preserved, and have since been restored by Donald McLean, a Scottish electrical engineer.[27] Baird's other developments were in fibre-optics, radio direction finding, infrared night viewing and radar. There is discussion about his exact contribution to the development of radar, for his wartime defence projects have never been officially acknowledged by the UK government. According to Malcolm Baird, his son, what is known is that in 1926 Baird filed a patent for a device that formed images from reflected radio waves, a device remarkably similar to radar, and that he was in correspondence with the British government at the time. The radar contribution is in dispute. According to some experts, Baird's "noctovision" is not radar. Unlike radar (except Doppler radar), Noctovision is incapable of determining the distance to the scanned subject. Noctovision also cannot determine the coordinates of the subject in three-dimensional space.[28]
Later years
From December 1944 until his death two years later, Baird lived at a house in Station Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, immediately north of the station itself.[29] Baird died in Bexhill on 14 June 1946 after a stroke in February. The old house was demolished in 2007. The Sea Road-Station Road skyline now features a new block of 51 flats on the site, renamed "Baird Court".John Logie Baird is buried with his mother, father and wife in Helensburgh Cemetery.
10:03 AM
Unknown
Ralph H. Baer
Ralph Baer (born March 8, 1922) is a German-born American video game pioneer, inventor, engineer, known as "The Father of Video Games",[1] who is noted for his many contributions to games and the video game industry. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for inventing the home console for video games and spawning the video game industry.Life
When Baer was eleven, he was expelled from school in Germany because of his Jewish ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Two months before Kristallnacht, he and his family escaped from Germany.[2][3][4][5][6][7] [8] [9] [10] In America, he was self-taught and worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II, assigned to Military intelligence at the US Army headquarters in London.Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering (unique at the time) from the American Television Institute of Technology [11][12] in Chicago in 1949.
In 1949, Baer went to work as chief engineer for a small electro medical equipment firm, Wappler, Inc where he designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and low frequency pulse generating muscle-toning equipment. In 1951, Baer went to work as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in the Bronx, New York, where he designed power line carrier signaling equipment for IBM. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president. He started his own company before joining Sanders Associates in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987.[13]
Baer is best known for leading the development of the Brown Box and Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console and his pioneering patented work in establishing video games.[14] He is now partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC,[15] and they have been inventing and marketing toy and game ideas since 1983.[16] In 2006, Baer donated all his hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian.[17]
Baer is a Life Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.[18]
Inventions
Baer started development of the "Brown Box" console video game system and several other prototypes in 1966 for the defense-electronics company Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems). In 1971, it was licensed to Magnavox, and after being renamed Magnavox Odyssey, the console was released to the public in 1972. For a time it was Sanders' most profitable line, though many in the company looked down on game development.Baer created the first light gun and game for home television use, sold grouped with a game expansion pack for the Odyssey, and collectively known as the Shooting Gallery.[16] The light gun itself was the first peripheral for a video game console.
During 1978-79 he with others created three popular electronic games.[19] Simon, an electronic pattern-matching game that was immensely popular from the late 1970s all the way up to the late 1990s.[20] "Super Simon" was released in the same year (1979) as was "Maniac"[19] but by separate manufacturers. Howard J. Morrison was on the design team for both the Simon games, but Baer seems to have invented Maniac alone.
10:01 AM
Unknown
Cornelis Drebbel
Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel[1] (1572 – 7 November 1633) was the Dutch builder of the first navigable submarine in 1620. Drebbel was an innovator who contributed to the development of measurement and control systems, optics and chemistry.A small lunar crater has been named after him.
Life
Cornelis Drebbel was born in Alkmaar, Holland. After some years at the Latin school in Alkmaar, around 1590, he attended the Academy in Haarlem, also located in North-Holland. Teachers at the Academy were Hendrick Goltzius, engraver, painter and humanist, Karel van Mander, painter, writer, humanist and Cornelis Corneliszoon of Haarlem. Drebbel became a skilled engraver.In 1595 he married Sophia Jansdochter Goltzius, sister of Hendrick. They had 4 children. In 1600, Drebbel was in Middelburg where he built a fountain at the Noorderpoort. He met there with Hans Lippershey, spectacle maker and constructor of telescopes, and his colleague Zacharias Jansen. There Drebbel learned lens grinding and optics. Around 1604 the Drebbel family moved to England, probably at the invitation of the new king, James I of England (VI of Scotland). Drebbel also worked at the masques, that were performed by and for the court. He was attached to the court of Renaissance crown-prince Henry.[2] In 1610 Drebbel and family were invited to come to the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. After Rudolf's death in 1612, Drebbel went back to London. Unfortunately his patron prince Henry had also died and Drebbel was in financial trouble.
Towards the end of his life, in 1633, Drebbel was involved in a plan to drain the Fens around Cambridge, while living in near-poverty running an ale house in England. He died in London.[3]
In keeping with traditional Mennonite practice, Drebbel's estate was split between his four living children at the time of his death.[4]
Works
Optics
In 1619 Drebbel designed and built telescopes and microscopes and was involved in a building project for the Duke of Buckingham. William Boreel, the Dutch Ambassador to England, mentions the microscope that was developed by Drebbel.[5] Drebbel became famous for his invention in 1621 of a microscope with two convex lenses. Several authors, including Christiaan Huygens assign the invention of the compound microscope to Drebbel. However, a Neapolitan, named Fontana, claimed the discovery for himself in 1618.[6] Other sources attribute the invention of the compound microscope directly to Hans Jansen and his son Zacharias around 1595.[7] In 1624 Galileo sent a Drebbel-type microscope to Federico Cesi (1585–1630), a wealthy noble man in Rome who used it to illustrate Apiarum, his book about bees.[8]Chemistry
Drebbel's most famous written work was Een kort Tractaet van de Natuere der Elementen[9] (A short treatise of the nature of the elements) (Haarlem, 1621). He was also involved in the invention of mercury fulminate.[10] He had found out that mixtures of “spiritus vini” with mercury and silver in “aqua fortis” could explode [11]Drebbel also invented a chicken incubator and a mercury thermostat that automatically kept it at a constant temperature.[12] This is one of the first recorded feedback-controlled devices. He also developed and demonstrated a working air conditioning system. The invention of a working thermometer is also ascribed to Drebbel [13]
Submarine
He also built the first navigable submarine in 1620 while working for the English Royal Navy.[14][15] Using William Bourne's design from 1578, he manufactured a steerable submarine with a leather-covered wooden frame. Between 1620 and 1624 Drebbel successfully built and tested two more submarines, each one bigger than the last. The final (third) model had 6 oars and could carry 16 passengers. This model was demonstrated to King James I in person and several thousand Londoners. The submarine stayed submerged for three hours and could travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back, cruising at a depth of from 12 to 15 feet (4 to 5 metres). Drebbel even took James in this submarine on a test dive beneath the Thames, making James I the first monarch to travel underwater.[16] This submarine was tested many times in the Thames, but it couldn't attract enough enthusiasm from the Admiralty and was never used in combat.To re-oxygenate the air inside one or more of these submarines, he likely generated oxygen by heating nitre (potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate) in a metal pan to make it emit oxygen. That would also turn the nitrate into sodium or potassium oxide or hydroxide, which would tend to absorb carbon dioxide from the air around. That may explain how Drebbel's men were not affected by carbon dioxide build-up as much as would be expected. If so, he accidentally made a crude rebreather nearly three centuries before Fluess and Davis.[17] Drebbel had been taught by the alchemist Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636) (perhaps when both were at the court of Rudolf II) that warming nitre produced oxygen.[18] The most reliable source suggesting the use of oxygen is a note by Robert Boyle. In 1662 Boyle wrote that he had spoken with an excellent mathematician, who was still alive and had been on the submarine, who said that Drebbel had a chemical liquor that would replace that quintessence of air that was able to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart.
More recently it has been suggested that the contemporary accounts of the craft contained significant elements of exaggeration and it was at most a semi-submersible that was able to travel down the Thames by the force of the current.[19]
Scarlet dye
The story goes that, while making a coloured liquid for a thermometer Cornelis dropped a flask of Aqua regia on a tin window sill, and discovered that stannous chloride makes the color of carmine much brighter and more durable. Though the inventor himself never made much money from his work, his daughters Anna and Catharina and his sons-in-law Abraham and Johannes Sibertus Kuffler set up a very successful dye works. One was set up in 1643 in Bow, London, and the resulting color was called bow dye.[20] The recipe for "color Kufflerianus" was kept a family secret and the new bright red color was all the rage in Europe.[21] [22]Cultural references
Cornelis Drebbel has been honored on postage stamps issued by the postal services of both Mali and the Netherlands in 2010.<ref[3]</ref>A portrayal of Cornelis Drebbel and his submarine can be briefly seen in the film The Four Musketeers (1974). A small leatherclad submersible surfaces off the coast of England, and the top opens clamshell-wise revealing Cornelis Drebbel and the Duke of Buckingham.
Drebbel was honored in an episode of the cartoon Sealab 2021 during a submarine rescue of workers on a research station in the Arctic. A German U-boat captain fired a pistol in celebration at the mention of Drebbel, to shouts of, "Sieg Heil! Cornelis Drebbel!" Also, on the Sealab 2021 Season 3 DVD, Cornelis Drebbel has two DVD commentaries devoted to the story of his life. However, the first is highly inaccurate and the narrator of the second gets easily distracted, so much so that he spends most of the eleven minutes of commentary talking about the languages of northern Europe and the domestic policies of the Swiss.
In the Dutch Eighty Years' War comic Gilles de Geus, Drebbel is a supporting character to the warhero Gilles. He is drawn as a crazy inventor, similar to Q in the James Bond series. His submarine plays a role in the comic.
Richard SantaColoma has speculated that the Voynich Manuscript may be connected to Drebbel, initially suggesting it was Drebbel's cipher notebook on microscopy and alchemy, and then later hypothesising it is a fictional "tie in" to Francis Bacon's utopian novel New Atlantis in which some Drebbel-related items (submarine, perpetual clock) are said to appear.[23]
9:59 AM
Unknown
Early life
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847.[10] The family home was at 16 South Charlotte Street, and has a stone inscription, marking it as Alexander Graham Bell's birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell (1845–70) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–67). Both of his brothers died of tuberculosis.[11] His father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, and his mother was Eliza Grace (née Symonds).[N 6] Although he was born "Alexander", at age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers.[12][N 7] For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the middle name "Graham", chosen out of admiration for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father and boarder who had become a family friend.[13] To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck" which his father continued to call him into later life.[14]First invention
As a child, young Alexander displayed a natural curiosity about his world, resulting in gathering botanical specimens as well as experimenting even at an early age. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbor whose family operated a flour mill, the scene of many forays. Young Aleck asked what needed to be done at the mill. He was told wheat had to be dehusked through a laborious process and at the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation and used steadily for a number of years.[15] In return, John Herdman gave both boys the run of a small workshop in which to "invent".[15]From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family's pianist.[16] Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he reveled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits.[16] Bell was also deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour.[17] He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity.[18] Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study acoustics.
His family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist (1860),[16] which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how to instruct deaf-mutes (as they were then known) to articulate words and read other people's lip movements to decipher meaning. Aleck's father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound.[19] Aleck became so proficient that he became a part of his father's public demonstrations and astounded audiences with his abilities. He could decipher Visible Speech representing virtually every language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic and even Sanskrit, accurately reciting written tracts without any prior knowledge of their pronunciation.[19]
Education
As a young child, Bell, like his brothers, received his early schooling at home from his father. At an early age, however, he was enrolled at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, Scotland, which he left at age 15, completing only the first four forms.[20] His school record was undistinguished, marked by absenteeism and lacklustre grades. His main interest remained in the sciences, especially biology, while he treated other school subjects with indifference, to the dismay of his demanding father.[21] Upon leaving school, Bell travelled to London to live with his grandfather, Alexander Bell. During the year he spent with his grandfather, a love of learning was born, with long hours spent in serious discussion and study. The elder Bell took great efforts to have his young pupil learn to speak clearly and with conviction, the attributes that his pupil would need to become a teacher himself.[22] At age 16, Bell secured a position as a "pupil-teacher" of elocution and music, in Weston House Academy, at Elgin, Moray, Scotland. Although he was enrolled as a student in Latin and Greek, he instructed classes himself in return for board and £10 per session.[23] The following year, he attended the University of Edinburgh; joining his older brother Melville who had enrolled there the previous year. In 1868, not long before he departed for Canada with his family, Aleck completed his matriculation exams and was accepted for admission to the University of London.[24]First experiments with sound
Bell's father encouraged Aleck's interest in speech and, in 1863, took his sons to see a unique automaton, developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone based on the earlier work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.[25] The rudimentary "mechanical man" simulated a human voice. Aleck was fascinated by the machine and after he obtained a copy of von Kempelen's book, published in German, and had laboriously translated it, he and his older brother Melville built their own automaton head. Their father, highly interested in their project, offered to pay for any supplies and spurred the boys on with the enticement of a "big prize" if they were successful.[25] While his brother constructed the throat and larynx, Aleck tackled the more difficult task of recreating a realistic skull. His efforts resulted in a remarkably lifelike head that could "speak", albeit only a few words.[25] The boys would carefully adjust the "lips" and when a bellows forced air through the windpipe, a very recognizable "Mama" ensued, to the delight of neighbors who came to see the Bell invention.[26]Intrigued by the results of the automaton, Bell continued to experiment with a live subject, the family's Skye Terrier, "Trouve".[27] After he taught it to growl continuously, Aleck would reach into its mouth and manipulate the dog's lips and vocal cords to produce a crude-sounding "Ow ah oo ga ma ma". With little convincing, visitors believed his dog could articulate "How are you grandma?" More indicative of his playful nature, his experiments convinced onlookers that they saw a "talking dog".[28] However, these initial forays into experimentation with sound led Bell to undertake his first serious work on the transmission of sound, using tuning forks to explore resonance.
At the age of 19, he wrote a report on his work and sent it to philologist Alexander Ellis, a colleague of his father (who would later be portrayed as Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion).[28] Ellis immediately wrote back indicating that the experiments were similar to existing work in Germany, and also lent Aleck a copy of Hermann von Helmholtz's work, The Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.[29]
Dismayed to find that groundbreaking work had already been undertaken by Helmholtz who had conveyed vowel sounds by means of a similar tuning fork "contraption", he pored over the German scientist's book. Working from his own errant mistranslation of a French edition,[30] Aleck fortuitously then made a deduction that would be the underpinning of all his future work on transmitting sound, reporting: "Without knowing much about the subject, it seemed to me that if vowel sounds could be produced by electrical means, so could consonants, so could articulate speech." He also later remarked: "I thought that Helmholtz had done it ... and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It was a valuable blunder ... If I had been able to read German in those days, I might never have commenced my experiments!"[31][32][33][N 8]
Family tragedy
In 1865, when the Bell family moved to London,[34] Bell returned to Weston House as an assistant master and, in his spare hours, continued experiments on sound using a minimum of laboratory equipment. Bell concentrated on experimenting with electricity to convey sound and later installed a telegraph wire from his room in Somerset College to that of a friend.[35] Throughout late 1867, his health faltered mainly through exhaustion. His younger brother, Edward "Ted," was similarly bed-ridden, suffering from tuberculosis. While Bell recovered (by then referring to himself in correspondence as "A.G. Bell") and served the next year as an instructor at Somerset College, Bath, England, his brother's condition deteriorated. Edward would never recover. Upon his brother's death, Bell returned home in 1867. His older brother Melville had married and moved out. With aspirations to obtain a degree at the University College London, Bell considered his next years as preparation for the degree examinations, devoting his spare time at his family's residence to studying.Helping his father in Visible Speech demonstrations and lectures brought Bell to Susanna E. Hull's private school for the deaf in South Kensington, London. His first two pupils were "deaf mute" girls who made remarkable progress under his tutelage. While his older brother seemed to achieve success on many fronts including opening his own elocution school, applying for a patent on an invention, and starting a family, Bell continued as a teacher. However, in May 1870, Melville died from complications due to tuberculosis, causing a family crisis. His father had also suffered a debilitating illness earlier in life and had been restored to health by a convalescence in Newfoundland. Bell's parents embarked upon a long-planned move when they realized that their remaining son was also sickly. Acting decisively, Alexander Melville Bell asked Bell to arrange for the sale of all the family property,[36][N 9] conclude all of his brother's affairs (Bell took over his last student, curing a pronounced lisp),[37] and join his father and mother in setting out for the "New World".[38] Reluctantly, Bell also had to conclude a relationship with Marie Eccleston, who, he had surmised, was not prepared to leave England with him.[38]
Canada
Main article: Bell Homestead National Historic Site
In 1870, at age 23, Bell, his brother's widow, Caroline (Margaret Ottaway),[39] and his parents travelled on the SS Nestorian to Canada.[40] After landing at Quebec City, the Bells boarded a train to Montreal and later to Paris, Ontario,
to stay with the Reverend Thomas Henderson, a family friend. After a
brief stay with the Hendersons, the Bell family purchased a farm of 10.5
acres (42,000 m2) at Tutelo Heights (now called Tutela Heights), near Brantford, Ontario. The property consisted of an orchard, large farm house, stable, pigsty, hen-house and a carriage house, which bordered the Grand River.[41][N 10]At the homestead, Bell set up his own workshop in the converted carriage house[43] near to what he called his "dreaming place", a large hollow nestled in trees at the back of the property above the river.[44] Despite his frail condition upon arriving in Canada, Bell found the climate and environs to his liking, and rapidly improved.[45][N 11] He continued his interest in the study of the human voice and when he discovered the Six Nations Reserve across the river at Onondaga, he learned the Mohawk language and translated its unwritten vocabulary into Visible Speech symbols. For his work, Bell was awarded the title of Honorary Chief and participated in a ceremony where he donned a Mohawk headdress and danced traditional dances.[46][N 12]
After setting up his workshop, Bell continued experiments based on Helmholtz's work with electricity and sound.[43] He also modified a melodeon (a type of pump organ) so that it could transmit its music electrically over a distance.[47] Once the family was settled in, both Bell and his father made plans to establish a teaching practice and in 1871, he accompanied his father to Montreal, where Melville was offered a position to teach his System of Visible Speech.
Work with the deaf
Bell's father was invited by Sarah Fuller, principal of the Boston School for Deaf Mutes (which continues today as the public Horace Mann School for the Deaf),[48] in Boston, Massachusetts, to introduce the Visible Speech System by providing training for Fuller's instructors, but he declined the post, in favor of his son. Traveling to Boston in April 1871, Bell proved successful in training the school's instructors.[49] He was subsequently asked to repeat the program at the American Asylum for Deaf-mutes in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts.Returning home to Brantford after six months abroad, Bell continued his experiments with his "harmonic telegraph".[50][N 13] The basic concept behind his device was that messages could be sent through a single wire if each message was transmitted at a different pitch, but work on both the transmitter and receiver was needed.[51] Unsure of his future, he first contemplated returning to London to complete his studies, but decided to return to Boston as a teacher.[52] His father helped him set up his private practice by contacting Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the president of the Clarke School for the Deaf for a recommendation. Teaching his father's system, in October 1872 Alexander Bell opened his "School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech" in Boston, which attracted a large number of deaf pupils with his first class numbering 30 students.[53][54] While he was working as a private tutor, one of his most famous pupils was Helen Keller, who came to him as a young child unable to see, hear, or speak. She was later to say that Bell dedicated his life to the penetration of that "inhuman silence which separates and estranges."[55]
Several influential people of the time, including Bell, viewed deafness as something that ought to be eradicated, and also believed that with resources and effort they could teach the deaf to speak and avoid the use of sign language, thus enabling their integration within the wider society from which many were often being excluded.[56] However in several schools children were mistreated, for example by having their hands tied behind their backs so they could not communicate by signing—the only language they knew—in order to force them to attempt oral communication. Due to his efforts to suppress the teaching of sign language, Bell is often viewed negatively by those embracing deaf culture.[57]
Continuing experimentation
In the following year, Bell became professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory. During this period, he alternated between Boston and Brantford, spending summers in his Canadian home. At Boston University, Bell was "swept up" by the excitement engendered by the many scientists and inventors residing in the city. He continued his research in sound and endeavored to find a way to transmit musical notes and articulate speech, but although absorbed by his experiments, he found it difficult to devote enough time to experimentation. While days and evenings were occupied by his teaching and private classes, Bell began to stay awake late into the night, running experiment after experiment in rented facilities at his boarding house. Keeping up "night owl" hours, he worried that his work would be discovered and took great pains to lock up his notebooks and laboratory equipment. Bell had a specially made table where he could place his notes and equipment inside a locking cover.[58] Worse still, his health deteriorated as he suffered severe headaches.[51] Returning to Boston in fall 1873, Bell made a fateful decision to concentrate on his experiments in sound.Deciding to give up his lucrative private Boston practice, Bell only retained two students, six-year old "Georgie" Sanders, deaf from birth and 15-year old Mabel Hubbard. Each pupil would serve to play an important role in the next developments. George's father, Thomas Sanders, a wealthy businessman, offered Bell a place to stay at nearby Salem with Georgie's grandmother, complete with a room to "experiment". Although the offer was made by George's mother and followed the year-long arrangement in 1872 where her son and his nurse had moved to quarters next to Bell's boarding house, it was clear that Mr. Sanders was backing the proposal. The arrangement was for teacher and student to continue their work together with free room and board thrown in.[59] Mabel was a bright, attractive girl who was ten years his junior but became the object of Bell's affection. Losing her hearing after a near-fatal bout of scarlet fever close to her fifth birthday,[60][61][N 14] she had learned to read lips but her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Bell's benefactor and personal friend, wanted her to work directly with her teacher.[62]
Telephone
Main article: Invention of the telephone
By 1874, Bell's initial work on the harmonic telegraph had entered a
formative stage with progress it made both at his new Boston
"laboratory" (a rented facility) as well as at his family home in Canada
a big success.[N 15] While working that summer in Brantford, Bell experimented with a "phonautograph",
a pen-like machine that could draw shapes of sound waves on smoked
glass by tracing their vibrations. Bell thought it might be possible to
generate undulating electrical currents that corresponded to sound
waves.[63]
Bell also thought that multiple metal reeds tuned to different
frequencies like a harp would be able to convert the undulating currents
back into sound. But he had no working model to demonstrate the
feasibility of these ideas.[64]In 1874, telegraph message traffic was rapidly expanding and in the words of Western Union President William Orton, had become "the nervous system of commerce". Orton had contracted with inventors Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to find a way to send multiple telegraph messages on each telegraph line to avoid the great cost of constructing new lines.[65] When Bell mentioned to Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders that he was working on a method of sending multiple tones on a telegraph wire using a multi-reed device, the two wealthy patrons began to financially support Bell's experiments.[66] Patent matters would be handled by Hubbard's patent attorney, Anthony Pollok.[67]
In March 1875, Bell and Pollok visited the famous scientist Joseph Henry, who was then director of the Smithsonian Institution, and asked Henry's advice on the electrical multi-reed apparatus that Bell hoped would transmit the human voice by telegraph. Henry replied that Bell had "the germ of a great invention". When Bell said that he did not have the necessary knowledge, Henry replied, "Get it!" That declaration greatly encouraged Bell to keep trying, even though he did not have the equipment needed to continue his experiments, nor the ability to create a working model of his ideas. However, a chance meeting in 1874 between Bell and Thomas A. Watson, an experienced electrical designer and mechanic at the electrical machine shop of Charles Williams, changed all that.
With financial support from Sanders and Hubbard, Bell hired Thomas Watson as his assistant,[N 16] and the two of them experimented with acoustic telegraphy. On June 2, 1875, Watson accidentally plucked one of the reeds and Bell, at the receiving end of the wire, heard the overtones of the reed; overtones that would be necessary for transmitting speech. That demonstrated to Bell that only one reed or armature was necessary, not multiple reeds. This led to the "gallows" sound-powered telephone, which could transmit indistinct, voice-like sounds, but not clear speech.
The race to the patent office
Main article: Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy
In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph and drew up a patent application
for it. Since he had agreed to share U.S. profits with his investors
Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, Bell requested that an associate in
Ontario, George Brown,
attempt to patent it in Britain, instructing his lawyers to apply for a
patent in the U.S. only after they received word from Britain (Britain
would issue patents only for discoveries not previously patented
elsewhere).[70]
Bell's patent 174,465, was issued to Bell on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell's patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound"[72] [N 17] Bell returned to Boston the same day and the next day resumed work, drawing in his notebook a diagram similar to that in Gray's patent caveat.
On March 10, 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work, using a liquid transmitter similar to Gray's design. Vibration of the diaphragm caused a needle to vibrate in the water, varying the electrical resistance in the circuit. When Bell spoke the famous sentence "Mr Watson—Come here—I want to see you" into the liquid transmitter,[73] Watson, listening at the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly.[74]
Although Bell was, and still is, accused of stealing the telephone from Gray,[75] Bell used Gray's water transmitter design only after Bell's patent was granted and only as a proof of concept scientific experiment[76] to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell's words) could be electrically transmitted.[77] After March 1876, Bell focused on improving the electromagnetic telephone and never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use.[78]
The question of priority for the variable resistance feature of the telephone was raised by the Examiner before he approved Bell's patent application. He told Bell that his claim for the variable resistance feature was also described in Gray's caveat. Bell pointed to a variable resistance device in Bell's previous application in which Bell described a cup of mercury, not water. Bell had filed the mercury application at the patent office a year earlier on February 25, 1875, long before Elisha Gray described the water device. In addition, Gray abandoned his caveat, and because Gray did not contest Bell's priority, the Examiner approved Bell's patent on March 3, 1876. Gray had reinvented the variable resistance telephone, but Bell was the first to write down the idea and the first to test it in a telephone.[79]
The patent examiner, Zenas Fisk Wilber, later stated in a sworn affidavit that he was an alcoholic who was much in debt to Bell's lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, with whom he had served in the Civil War. He claimed he showed Gray's patent caveat to Bailey. Wilber also claimed (after Bell arrived in Washington D.C. from Boston) that he showed Gray's caveat to Bell and that Bell paid him $100. Bell claimed they discussed the patent only in general terms, although in a letter to Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details. Bell denied in a sworn affidavit that he ever gave Wilber any money.[80]
Later developments
Continuing his experiments in Brantford, Bell brought home a working model of his telephone. On August 3, 1876, from the telegraph office in Mount Pleasant five miles (8 km) away from Brantford, Bell sent a tentative telegram indicating that he was ready. With curious onlookers packed into the office as witnesses, faint voices were heard replying. The following night, he amazed guests as well as his family when a message was received at the Bell home from Brantford, four miles (six km) distant along an improvised wire strung up along telegraph lines and fences, and laid through a tunnel. This time, guests at the household distinctly heard people in Brantford reading and singing. These experiments clearly proved that the telephone could work over long distances.[81]
Bell began a series of public demonstrations and lectures to introduce the new invention to the scientific community as well as the general public. A short time later, his demonstration of an early telephone prototype at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia brought the telephone to international attention.[84] Influential visitors to the exhibition included Emperor Pedro II of Brazil. Later Bell had the opportunity to demonstrate the invention personally to Sir William Thomson (later, Lord Kelvin), a renowned Scottish scientist, as well as to Queen Victoria who had requested a private audience at Osborne House, her Isle of Wight home. She called the demonstration "most extraordinary". The enthusiasm surrounding Bell's public displays laid the groundwork for universal acceptance of the revolutionary device.[85]
The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886, more than 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones. Bell company engineers made numerous other improvements to the telephone, which emerged as one of the most successful products ever. In 1879, the Bell company acquired Edison's patents for the carbon microphone from Western Union. This made the telephone practical for longer distances and it was no longer necessary to shout to be heard at the receiving telephone.
In January 1915, Bell made the first ceremonial transcontinental telephone call. Calling from the AT&T head office at 15 Dey Street in New York City, Bell was heard by Thomas Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The New York Times reported:
On October 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a two-mile wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held. Yesterday afternoon [on January 25, 1915] the same two men talked by telephone to each other over a 3,400-mile wire between New York and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago.[86]
Competitors
As is sometimes common in scientific discoveries, simultaneous developments can occur, as evidenced by a number of inventors who were at work on the telephone.[6] Over a period of 18 years, the Bell Telephone Company faced 587 court challenges to its patents, including five that went to the U.S. Supreme Court,[87] but none was successful in establishing priority over the original Bell patent[88][89] and the Bell Telephone Company never lost a case that had proceeded to a final trial stage.[88] Bell's laboratory notes and family letters were the key to establishing a long lineage to his experiments.[88] The Bell company lawyers successfully fought off myriad lawsuits generated initially around the challenges by Elisha Gray and Amos Dolbear. In personal correspondence to Bell, both Gray and Dolbear had acknowledged his prior work, which considerably weakened their later claims.[90]On January 13, 1887, the U,S. Government moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. After a series of decisions and reversals, the Bell company won a decision in the Supreme Court, though a couple of the original claims from the lower court cases were left undecided.[91][92] By the time that the trial wound its way through nine years of legal battles, the U.S. prosecuting attorney had died and the two Bell patents (No. 174,465 and dated March 7, 1876 and No. 186,787 dated January 30, 1877) were no longer in effect, although the presiding judges agreed to continue the proceedings due to the case's importance as a "precedent". With a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest (on both sides) arising from the original trial, the US Attorney General dropped the lawsuit on November 30, 1897 leaving several issues undecided on the merits.[93]
During a deposition filed for the 1887 trial, Italian inventor Antonio Meucci also claimed to have created the first working model of a telephone in Italy in 1834. In 1886, in the first of three cases in which he was involved, Meucci took the stand as a witness in the hopes of establishing his invention's priority. Meucci's evidence in this case was disputed due to a lack of material evidence for his inventions as his working models were purportedly lost at the laboratory of American District Telegraph (ADT) of New York, which was later incorporated as a subsidiary of Western Union in 1901.[94][95] Meucci's work, like many other inventors of the period, was based on earlier acoustic principles and despite evidence of earlier experiments, the final case involving Meucci was eventually dropped upon Meucci's death.[96] However, due to the efforts of Congressman Vito Fossella, the U.S. House of Representatives on June 11, 2002 stated that Meucci's "work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged", even though this did not put an end to a still contentious issue.[97][98] [N 18][99] Some modern scholars do not agree with the claims that Bell's work on the telephone was influenced by Meucci's inventions.[100] [N 19]
The value of the Bell patent was acknowledged throughout the world, and patent applications were made in most major countries, but when Bell had delayed the German patent application, the electrical firm of Siemens & Halske (S&H) managed to set up a rival manufacturer of Bell telephones under their own patent. The Siemens company produced near-identical copies of the Bell telephone without having to pay royalties.[101] The establishment of the International Bell Telephone Company in Brussels, Belgium in 1880, as well as a series of agreements in other countries eventually consolidated a global telephone operation. The strain put on Bell by his constant appearances in court, necessitated by the legal battles, eventually resulted in his resignation from the company.[102][N 20]
Further information: The Telephone Cases
Family life
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bell and his family members |
Bell was a British subject throughout his early life in Scotland and later in Canada until 1882, when he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1915, he characterized his status as: "I am not one of those hyphenated Americans who claim allegiance to two countries."[110] Despite this declaration, Bell has been proudly claimed as a "native son" by all three countries he resided in: the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.[111]
By 1885, a new summer retreat was contemplated. That summer, the Bells had a vacation on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, spending time at the small village of Baddeck.[112] Returning in 1886, Bell started building an estate on a point across from Baddeck, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake.[113] By 1889, a large house, christened The Lodge was completed and two years later, a larger complex of buildings, including a new laboratory,[112] were begun that the Bells would name Beinn Bhreagh (Gaelic: beautiful mountain) after Alec's ancestral Scottish highlands.[114] [N 27]Bell would spend his final, and some of his most productive, years in residence in both Washington, D.C., where he and his family initially resided for most of the year, and at Beinn Bhreagh.[115]
Until the end of his life, Bell and his family would alternate between the two homes, but Beinn Bhreagh would, over the next 30 years, become more than a summer home as Bell became so absorbed in his experiments that his annual stays lengthened. Both Mabel and Alec became immersed in the Baddeck community and were accepted by the villagers as "their own".[112][N 28] The Bells were still in residence at Beinn Bhreagh when the Halifax Explosion occurred on December 6, 1917. Mabel and Alec mobilized the community to help victims in Halifax.[116]
Further information: Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia
Later inventions
|
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bell's many inventions |
Bell worked extensively in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. During his Volta Laboratory period, Bell and his associates considered impressing a magnetic field on a record as a means of reproducing sound. Although the trio briefly experimented with the concept, they could not develop a workable prototype. They abandoned the idea, never realizing they had glimpsed a basic principle which would one day find its application in the tape recorder, the hard disc and floppy disc drive and other magnetic media.
Bell's own home used a primitive form of air conditioning, in which fans blew currents of air across great blocks of ice. He also anticipated modern concerns with fuel shortages and industrial pollution. Methane gas, he reasoned, could be produced from the waste of farms and factories. At his Canadian estate in Nova Scotia, he experimented with composting toilets and devices to capture water from the atmosphere. In a magazine interview published shortly before his death, he reflected on the possibility of using solar panels to heat houses.
Photophone
Main article: Photophone
On June 21, 1880, Bell's assistant transmitted a wireless voice telephone message a considerable distance, from the roof of the Franklin School in Washington, D.C., to Bell at the window of his laboratory, some 213 metres (700 ft) away, 19 years before the first voice radio transmissions.[108][120][121][122]
Bell believed the photophone's principles were his life's "greatest achievement", telling a reporter shortly before his death that the photophone was "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone".[123] The photophone was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems which achieved popular worldwide usage in the 1980s.[124][125] Its master patent was issued in December 1880, many decades before the photophone's principles came into popular use.
Metal detector
Bell's own detailed account, presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1882, differs in several particulars from most of the many and varied versions now in circulation, most notably by concluding that extraneous metal was not to blame for failure to locate the bullet. Perplexed by the peculiar results he had obtained during an examination of Garfield, Bell "...proceeded to the Executive Mansion the next morning...to ascertain from the surgeons whether they were perfectly sure that all metal had been removed from the neighborhood of the bed. It was then recollected that underneath the horse-hair mattress on which the President lay was another mattress composed of steel wires. Upon obtaining a duplicate, the mattress was found to consist of a sort of net of woven steel wires, with large meshes. The extent of the [area that produced a response from the detector] having been so small, as compared with the area of the bed, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the steel mattress had produced no detrimental effect." In a footnote, Bell adds that "The death of President Garfield and the subsequent post-mortem examination, however, proved that the bullet was at too great a distance from the surface to have affected our apparatus."[127]
Hydrofoils
Main article: HD-4
During his world tour of 1910–11, Bell and Baldwin met with Forlanini in France. They had rides in the Forlanini hydrofoil boat over Lake Maggiore. Baldwin described it as being as smooth as flying. On returning to Baddeck, a number of initial concepts were built as experimental models, including the Dhonnas Beag, the first self-propelled Bell-Baldwin hydrofoil.[128] The experimental boats were essentially proof-of-concept prototypes that culminated in the more substantial HD-4, powered by Renault engines. A top speed of 54 miles per hour (87 km/h) was achieved, with the hydrofoil exhibiting rapid acceleration, good stability and steering along with the ability to take waves without difficulty.[129] In 1913, Dr. Bell hired Walter Pinaud, a Sydney yacht designer and builder as well as the proprietor of Pinaud's Yacht Yard in Westmount, Nova Scotia to work on the pontoons of the HD-4. Pinaud soon took over the boatyard at Bell Laboratories on Beinn Bhreagh, Bell's estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Pinaud's experience in boat-building enabled him to make useful design changes to the HD-4. After the First World War, work began again on the HD-4. Bell's report to the U.S. Navy permitted him to obtain two 350 horsepower (260 kW) engines in July 1919. On September 9, 1919, the HD-4 set a world marine speed record of 70.86 miles per hour (114.04 km/h),[130] a record which stood for ten years.
Aeronautics
Main articles: Aerial Experiment Association and AEA Silver Dart
In 1898, Bell experimented with tetrahedral box kites and wings constructed of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in maroon silk.[N 29] The tetrahedral wings were named Cygnet I, II and III, and were flown both unmanned and manned (Cygnet I crashed during a flight carrying Selfridge) in the period from 1907–1912. Some of Bell's kites are on display at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.[132]
Bell was a supporter of aerospace engineering research through the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), officially formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in October 1907 at the suggestion of his wife Mabel and with her financial support after the sale of some of her real estate.[133] The AEA was headed by Bell and the founding members were four young men: American Glenn H. Curtiss, a motorcycle manufacturer at the time and who held the title "world's fastest man", having ridden his self-constructed motor bicycle around in the shortest time, and who was later awarded the Scientific American Trophy for the first official one-kilometre flight in the Western hemisphere, and who later became a world-renowned airplane manufacturer; Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, an official observer from the U.S. Federal government and the only person in the army who believed aviation was the future; Frederick W. Baldwin, the first Canadian and first British subject to pilot a public flight in Hammondsport, New York, and J.A.D. McCurdy —Baldwin and McCurdy being new engineering graduates from the University of Toronto.[134]
The AEA's work progressed to heavier-than-air machines, applying their knowledge of kites to gliders. Moving to Hammondsport, the group then designed and built the Red Wing, framed in bamboo and covered in red silk and powered by a small air-cooled engine.[135] On March 12, 1908, over Keuka Lake, the biplane lifted off on the first public flight in North America.[N 30] [N 31] The innovations that were incorporated into this design included a cockpit enclosure and tail rudder (later variations on the original design would add ailerons as a means of control). One of the AEA's inventions, a practical wingtip form of the aileron, was to become a standard component on all aircraft. [N 32] The White Wing and June Bug were to follow and by the end of 1908, over 150 flights without mishap had been accomplished. However, the AEA had depleted its initial reserves and only a $15,000 grant from Mrs. Bell allowed it to continue with experiments.[136]
Their final aircraft design, the Silver Dart embodied all of the advancements found in the earlier machines. On February 23, 1909, Bell was present as the Silver Dart flown by J.A.D. McCurdy from the frozen ice of Bras d'Or, made the first aircraft flight in Canada.[137] Bell had worried that the flight was too dangerous and had arranged for a doctor to be on hand. With the successful flight, the AEA disbanded and the Silver Dart would revert to Baldwin and McCurdy who began the Canadian Aerodrome Company and would later demonstrate the aircraft to the Canadian Army.[138]
Eugenics
Bell was connected with the eugenics movement in the United States. In his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences on November 13, 1883 he noted that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children and tentatively suggested that couples where both parties were deaf should not marry.[139] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.[140] From 1912 until 1918 he was the chairman of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and regularly attended meetings. In 1921, he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics held under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Organisations such as these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a "defective variety of the human race". By the late 1930s, about half the states in the U.S. had eugenics laws, and California's compulsory sterilization law was used as a model for that of Nazi Germany.[141]Legacy and honors
Main articles: Volta Laboratory and Bureau and Alexander Graham Bell honors and tributes
A large number of Bell's writings, personal correspondence, notebooks, papers and other documents[146] reside at both the United States Library of Congress Manuscript Division (as the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers), and at the Alexander Graham Bell Institute, Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia; major portions of which are available for online viewing.
A number of historic sites and other marks commemorate Bell in North America and Europe, including the first telephone companies of the United States and Canada. Among the major sites are:
- The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, maintained by Parks Canada, which incorporates the Alexander Graham Bell Museum, in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, close to the Bell estate Beinn Bhreagh[147]
- The Bell Homestead National Historic Site, includes the Bell family home, "Melville House", and farm overlooking Brantford, Ontario and the Grand River. It was their first home in North America;
- Canada's first telephone company building, the "Henderson Home" of the late 1870s, a predecessor of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada (officially chartered in 1880). In 1969 the building was carefully moved to the historic Bell Homestead National Historic Site in Brantford, Ontario and was refurbished to become a telephone museum. The Bell Homestead, the Henderson Home telephone museum, and the National Historic Site's reception centre are all maintained by the Bell Homestead Society;[148]
- The Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Park, which features a broad neoclassical monument built in 1917 by public subscription. The monument graphically depicts mankind's ability to span the globe through telecommunications;[149]
- The Alexander Graham Bell Museum (opened in 1956), part of the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site which was completed in 1978 in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Many of the museum's artifacts were donated by Bell's daughters;
In partnership with Gardiner Hubbard, Bell helped establish the publication Science during the early 1880s. In 1888, Bell was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society and became its second president (1897–1904), and also became a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution (1898–1922). The French government conferred on him the decoration of the Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honor); the Royal Society of Arts in London awarded him the Albert Medal in 1902; the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, granted him a PhD, and he was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1912. He was one of the founders of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1884, and served as its president from 1891–92. Bell was later awarded the AIEE's Edison Medal in 1914 "For meritorious achievement in the invention of the telephone".[160]
The bel (B) and the smaller decibel (dB) are units of measurement of sound intensity invented by Bell Labs and named after him.[161] [N 34][162] Since 1976 the IEEE's Alexander Graham Bell Medal has been awarded to honor outstanding contributions in the field of telecommunications.
The 150th anniversary of Bell's birth in 1997 was marked by a special issue of commemorative £1 banknotes from the Royal Bank of Scotland. The illustrations on the reverse of the note include Bell's face in profile, his signature, and objects from Bell's life and career: users of the telephone over the ages; an audio wave signal; a diagram of a telephone receiver; geometric shapes from engineering structures; representations of sign language and the phonetic alphabet; the geese which helped him to understand flight; and the sheep which he studied to understand genetics.[165] Additionally, the Government of Canada honored Bell in 1997 with a C$100 gold coin, in tribute also to the 150th anniversary of his birth, and with a silver dollar coin in 2009 to honor of the 100th anniversary of flight in Canada. That first flight was made by an airplane designed under Dr. Bell's tutelage, named the Silver Dart.[166] Bell's image, and also those of his many inventions have graced paper money, coinage and postal stamps in numerous countries worldwide for many dozens of years.
Alexander Graham Bell was ranked 57th among the 100 Greatest Britons (2002) in an official BBC nationwide poll, and among the Top Ten Greatest Canadians (2004), and the 100 Greatest Americans (2005).[167][168] In 2006 Bell was also named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history after having been listed in the National Library of Scotland's 'Scottish Science Hall of Fame'.[169] Bell's name is still widely known and used as part of the names of dozens of educational institutes, corporate namesakes, street and place names around the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
