Introduction

IN 1874, while Alexander Graham Bell (who considered himself to be a teacher of the deaf, more than the inventor of the telephone) was working on the harmonic telegraph, the telephone and hearing aids for the deaf, he built a device called phonoautograph. The device was made with Frankensteinian ingenuity out of a dead man’s ear (It is not recorded just where the ear came from, volunteered or otherwise.). Speaking into the device caused the ear to operate … like an ear. The ear’s membrane vibrated according to the intensity of the voice, more for louder voices or sounds, less for quieter sounds or whispers. This in turn caused a lever attached to the ear to “write” a wave pattern on smoked glass; bigger waves for louder sounds and smaller for quieter sounds. This inspired Bell. He thought that, by using a membrane to convert sounds of varying intensity into electrical current of varying intensity (instead of just the working of the lever) and then reversing the process on the other end with another membrane, he could replicate speech over long distances. It took him two years to put this idea into practice, but it became the founding principle of telephony.