WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone cover

The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone

Chapter 42: Transcriber’s Notes
By Thomas Augustus Watson
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

American LiteratureBiographiesEngineering & TechnologyHistory - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

The author recounts his firsthand memories of the telephone's origin and early development, tracing his progression from an apprentice in a busy electrical workshop to the collaborator who built and tested experimental apparatus. He describes day-to-day shop life, technical challenges, encounters with other inventors, and the close working relationship with the principal inventor during the device's formative experiments. The narrative also sketches his later transition from telephony to founding a machine and shipbuilding enterprise, and his return to formal study and public lecturing in later years.

[1]“Ahoy!” was the first telephone shout, and was used during the experiments, but “hello!” superseded it when the telephone got into practical use.
[2]Excludes private line telephones numbering 79,612 on December 31, 1938. Including telephones of about 6,500 connecting companies and more than 25,000 connecting rural lines, the total number of telephones in the United States which can be interconnected is approximately 19,885,000.
[3]For year ending December 31.
[4]The employees of the Western Electric Company, Inc., and the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., numbering 34,910 on December 31, 1938, are not included.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
1-1-40

109 Court Street, Boston, Where Bell Discovered the Principle of the Speaking Telephone

Transcriber’s Notes

  • Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
  • Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
  • In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.