First telephone twangIn 1875, Alexander Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson had been working on the "harmonic telegraph". In the transmitter room, Watson had been trying to free a reed that had been too tightly wound to the pole of its electromagnet, when it produced a twang. Bell, who had been working in the receiving room heard the twang. He realized that now his dream of speech transmission must be a possibility, for the complex overtones and timbre of the twang he had just heard had a lot in common with the sound of the human voice. The next day, they continued tinkering on their experiment, anxious to achieve more ambitious results.[Image: diagram of earlier device under test in Winter 1873] |
