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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Who Invented The Telephone?
Description: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson made an important discovery, by accident, on June 2, 1875. While working on their ‘harmonic telegraph’. Watson inadvertently plucked a reed that had been tightly wound around the pole of its electromagnet, producing a twang that Bell heard on a second device next door.Meanwhile, Elisha Gray, co-founder of Western Electric Company, was working on, as his patent put it, “Transmitting Vocal Sounds Telegraphically.” Gray had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years; an innovation which mysteriously turned up in Bell’s technology after Gray filed his patent...