You'll never guess who made the first wireless telephone | Hacker News Reader

You'll never guess who made the first wireless telephone

signoregalilei.com

62 pointssurprisetalk16 comments

Clickbait titles should be changed, as per the guidelines for HN submissions.

Also, don’t editorialize.

"You'll never guess who made the first wireless telephone (Graham Bell)"

I think he could have gotten away with naming his daughter Photophone, but he would have to pronounce it as if she were a character from an ancient greek epic: phoTOphoNEE.

"Antonio Meucci invented the telephone and he got robbed! Everybody knows that!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJDNCxMfbLQ

Alexander Graham Bell was a successful inventor and made breakthroughs with helicopters and hydrofoils. Definitely not a one trick pony.

IIRC, Bell ended up wanting to spend his life after inventing the telephone as a scientist and a researcher, rather than tending to the running of Bell Telephone and AT&T.

Well, it's a (usually believed for nationality reasons) myth that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

In reality, it was the German "Philipp Reis" who invented it. In Friedrichsdorf he made the first prototype and also invented the special (coal based) contact microphone used in phones ~ 1990. He demoed the prototype in 1861 before the physical society in Frankfurt/Main.

Later on he sold phones in quite low quantity, usually to experimenters. Examples of the phones made it as far as to Russia or Scotland. Bell, who was too from Scotland, learned about Reis' telephone in Edinburgh in 1862.

Bell reverse-engineered it, improved it, and created a successful business around it. And that's not something shabby...

... but he definitely didn't invent it. Not even the name. "Telephon" was the name that Philipp Reis already used.

Bell was not the inventor --- at least not for the telephone itself. Maybe for the telephone exchange.

Philipp Reis was the phone inventor. See my other post below for some details.

You will notice that I was not talking about telephones there.

As a kid I had this idea of using mirrors for wireless communication. I've never heard of this one before but it makes me very happy! I was thinking of using it for like, torrents or something though.

Just put an acoustic coupler on the back of a mirror and you’ve done half of the job. Don’t see any reason you couldn’t get modem speeds at the very least.

What kind of a signal were you thinking of bouncing off the mirror?

Sunlight, or possibly lasers. But sunlight seemed way cooler somehow.

The article mentions something I forgot though. Sometimes the weather is shit!

A few years later I read an article about some laser based relay on Hackaday, and it blew my mind. My school had fiber internet and I fantasized about setting up a relay of lasers so I could have super fast internet at my house.

Of course the shit weather thing affects lasers too (fog, rain, etc.), but you'd get a little more uptime :)

I did guess. There was a photophone project in one of those Forrest M. Mims notebooks you could get at Radio Shack, and it mentioned that Bell considered it even more important than the telephone.

In more technical terms, Bell used amplitude modulation of audio using light as the carrier wave, and selenium as a photoconductive transducer.

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