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QUIRKY SCIENCE (EP. 4)
EP. 4. A man with an ear for music, one of the first to try teaching the deaf how to speak, thought he could build a "harmonic telegraph". He had this idea that several notes could travel through a wire simultaneously, instead of the one Morse code that the telegraph could transmit. He thought this to be possible because he misinterpreted the writings of a researcher writing in German – a language he did not know. – And would later describe his misinterpretation as a "very valuable blunder". The man was Alexander Graham Bell and he invented telephony. The big question is: what happens in that wire? How can voices travel? Bell and his assistant eventually proved that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire. In fact, it’s the vibrations of the voice that determine the strength of the current. His invention caused a lot of fuss – yet it took years before people comprehended the scale of it: before the widespread use of the phone – whom were you going to call? Eventually, the telephone, or better said, its wiring, leads to the Internet. Nowadays we mostly make our calls ‘wireless’ so the wire Graham Bell used to make voices travel over long distances is no longer needed How does that work? Even wireless calling, some say, is actually a very unnatural way of communicating. Looking at the future, are we heading towards a ‘phoneless’ call?
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EP. 4. A man with an ear for music, one of the first to try teaching the deaf how to speak, thought he could build a "harmonic telegraph". He had this idea that several notes could travel through a wire simultaneously, instead of the one Morse code that the telegraph could transmit. He thought this to be possible because he misinterpreted the writings of a researcher writing in German – a language he did not know. – And would later describe his misinterpretation as a "very valuable blunder". The man was Alexander Graham Bell and he invented telephony. The big question is: what happens in that wire? How can voices travel? Bell and his assistant eventually proved that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire. In fact, it’s the vibrations of the voice that determine the strength of the current. His invention caused a lot of fuss – yet it took years before people comprehended the scale of it: before the widespread use of the phone – whom were you going to call? Eventually, the telephone, or better said, its wiring, leads to the Internet. Nowadays we mostly make our calls ‘wireless’ so the wire Graham Bell used to make voices travel over long distances is no longer needed How does that work? Even wireless calling, some say, is actually a very unnatural way of communicating. Looking at the future, are we heading towards a ‘phoneless’ call?