Title: A Time Before Phones: The Inventions Leading Up to the Telephone | THG Blog
Headings: A Time Before Phones: The Inventions Leading Up to the Telephone
A Time Before Phones: The Inventions Leading Up to the Telephone
Timelines Converge
Smoke Signals
Electricity
Holding Lightning in a Bottle (Leyden Jar)
Better Lightning through Chemistry (Batteries)
Magnetic Personalities (Electromagnets)
Pushing Electricity with Your Hand (Faraday)
Telegraph!
A Sausage Skin (and a Bit of Variable Resistance) Away from a Telephone
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Content: Still, it became more and more necessary to communicate instantly (as when a battalion of soldiers needed to move to help their compatriots, or a government needed to stop a war entirely), and so messengers were too slow; and to communicate over more than line-of-sight distances (again, a government, say the ancient Romans, trying to stop its troops from fighting is a good example, unless the troops are all stationed in the Senate chambers to begin with). One solution was a chain of signals—either smoke, flags, or signal fires—and this was used for thousands of years all over the world. It did, however, still have drawbacks, including that it took only one failed signal in the chain (due to sleepy guards, wood too wet to light, or what-have-you) to make the whole thing an act of futility. But how else does one communicate beyond the sound of one’s voice and the line of one’s sight? Electricity
As seems to have happened with a lot of things in history, electricity was “discovered”—or at least static electricity was—and then “forgotten” and then “discovered” again. The ancient Greeks, perhaps as early as 600 BC, had learned that they could create a static charge on amber by rubbing it, and that this charge could attract small bits of paper and other extremely light objects. They most likely also found out that you could shock your nearest friend with a static spark, but nobody seems to have thought that important enough to write down for posterity. Little was done with this knowledge until around 1600 AD, when William Gilbert, an English scientist, published “De magnete, magneticisique corporibus” or “On the Magnet,” a treatise describing all of his experiments with what he called “electricity,” after the Greek word for amber. He talked about electric force, magnetic poles, electric attraction, and even the magnetic compass.