Do you remember that old Verizon commercial where the spokesman would ask the question, “Can you hear me now? Good.” Well, that tagline wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone.

It was on this day in 1876 that Bell received a United States patent for his revolutionary new invention.

Every invention has a story and today we’re sharing Bell’s! Growing up, Bell worked with his father in London, where Bell’s father developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf.

This was just the first glimpse of innovation that gleamed through in Bell’s life. During the 1870s, the Bells uprooted their family and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. It was here that Alexander became very interested in exploring the possibility of transmitting speech via wires. It was a curious innovation that left him hungry to find a viable solution – after all, in 1843, Samuel F.B Morse’s invention of the telegraph made communication almost instantaneous between two locations both far and wide.

The only hiccup of the telegraph was that it still required that hand-delivered messages be sent between telegraph stations and recipients; not to mention, only one message could be transmitted at a time.

It was this problem that Bell set out to fix and fix it is exactly what he did when he created the “harmonic telegraph.” This device combined features of a telegraph and record player to give people the ability to speak to one another from a distance.

Bell didn’t work alone as he employed the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee that helped him develop a working prototype.

The first iteration of their invention of the telephone worked a little something like this. Sound waves created an electric current that varied in both intensity and frequency, which caused a thin, soft iron plate (a diaphragm) to vibrate. These vibrations were then magnetically transferred to another wire that was connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument.

When the diaphragm vibrated, the original sound was replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument.

Believe it or not, Bell filed his patent a mere two hours prior to Elisha Gray, who had a similar claim. That was a close one! Just three days after filing, Bell’s invention carried its first clear message, “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you,” a message that was sent from Bell to his assistant.

The story doesn’t end there. In fact, that’s where it begins. Gray was then employed by the Western Union Telegraph Company and worked alongside fellow inventor, Thomas A. Edison to invent their own telephone technology.

Bell wasn’t too happy with this idea, so he sued and the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, where Bell’s patent rights were upheld.

Copyright Davison, 2016

Sources:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/alexander-graham-bell-patents-the-telephone

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/alexander-graham-bell

Images:

https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2014/07/26/06/48/alexander-graham-bell-402095_640.jpg

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/84/115184-004-9C9C534F.jpg

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Leave it to a 1968 classic children’s film to provide just the right amount of inspiration and humor to keep us motivated.

Recently, our founder and CEO, Mr. Davison, shared the inspirational tune The Roses of Success from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a movie about a down-on-his-luck inventor who eventually invents a revolutionary flying car. See the song below.

Throughout this movie and this song in particular, viewers are shown that sometimes things don’t play out as you’d hope. This notion applies perfectly to the world of inventing.

Sometimes our imaginations run free and we believe that our inventions will be an instant record-breaking success. However, even some of the most famous inventors had to overcome obstacles in order to achieve success!

If you don’t believe us, here’s a short list of inventors who had to overcome failure.

Let’s start with an example right from the song!

Alexander Graham Bell – Straight from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a verse that encapsulates Bell’s struggles to claim his invention of the telephone as his own! For years and years, Bell faced legal challenges to claim that he was the sole inventor. Rather than give up, Bell embarked on one of the longest patent battles in history to fight for his idea.

Thomas Edison – The phonograph, electrical lamp and the movie camera were just a few of the inventions that are credited to Edison. However, none of these inventions, plus his more than 1,000 patents, would have been possible if he listened to his teachers that told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.”

Walt Disney – Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney World wouldn’t mean anything to us today if Walt Disney listened to the newspaper editor who fired him because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” But, that wasn’t the only failure that Disney ever experienced. In fact, several more of his business ventures failed before the premiere of his movie “Snow White.” Despite these failures, we can see today that those detours eventually would lead him down the road to ultimate success!

Thanks to our own founder and CEO Mr. Davison for sharing this inspirational clip to show us that even the most successful inventors had to overcome their fair share of failures and obstacles to reach their own Roses of Success!

Copyright Davison, 2015

Sources:

http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-failed-at-first-2014-3

Media:

https://youtu.be/GND10sWq0n0

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Alexander_Graham_Bell.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Thomas_Edison2.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Walt_Disney_1946.JPG

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