 1677, inventor Robert Hooke, who formulated the theory of planetary movement, demonstrated that sound vibrations could be transmitted over a piece of drawn iron wire, received at the other end, and interpreted correctly. His work proved to be something of a bell- wether, and in 1820, 143 years later, Charles Wheatstone transmitted interpretable sound vibrations through a variety of media including thin glass and metal rods. In 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated that vibra- tions such as those made by the human voice could be converted to elec- trical pulses. Needless to say, this was fundamental to the eventual development of the telephone. Bernard Finn is the Curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. His knowledge of the world of science and its van- guard during the heady times of telephony's arrival is unparalleled. He observes that America was a bit of a backwater as far as science was con- cerned. "The inventive climate of that early part of the century was largely [focused on] mechanical inventions," he notes. "Even the early electrical stuff was basically mechanical and the machine shop was the center of inventive activity." With the invention of the telegraph, which occurred simultaneously in the United States, England, and Germany in the 1830s, it became possi- ble to communicate immediately across significant distances. By the sec- ond half of the nineteenth century, three individuals were working on practical applications of Faraday's observations. Alexander Graham Bell, a speech teacher for the hearing impaired and a part-time inventor; Elijah Gray, the inventor of the telegraph and an employee of Western Electric; and Thomas Edison, an inventor and former employee of Western Union were all working on the same problem: how to send mul- tiple simultaneous messages across a single pair of wires. All three invented devices that they called harmonic telegraphs; they were noth- ing more than frequency division multiplexers, but for the time were remarkably advanced, conceptually. T