No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

bluescreen — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 16:48:01 GMT

Another one of my favorite examples.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI:520:333]

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GEDy042iNM:520:333]

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

D_Hersey — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:44:38 GMT

You poor fellow, I just love this topic! Let me give another example in the history of invention: Trigonometry.

Trigonometry, in whole cloth, was a result of a project of the Portuguese state, done by an apointed committee. Spherical was invented first, then plane. This is the sequence in which it should be taught, IMHO.

So if some neo-con blathers at you 'No government program ever generated anything novel!" and you don't feel like saying 'Penicillin,' or 'Sauk vaccine,' you can say 'trigonometry.'

The Portuguese wanted trig for cartography and navigation. They vastly improved both.

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

D_Hersey — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:33:20 GMT

Another guy is Kepler, a man who's work I completely admire. He did fundamental investigating into polyhedra and tessellations, among other things. The extensible soccer ball that Buckminster Fuller popularized is often attributed to him, but what, then, is that under the lion's paw at the Palace of Heavenly Peace?

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

D_Hersey — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:18:38 GMT

Sometimes a guy has discovered so much that so much is named after him that we just need other hooks. I am thinking of Leonhard Euler, in particular. FT would be more fairly attributed to him according to the scholars I have encountered, for example.

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

D_Hersey — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:12:52 GMT

Probably my favorite example of re-invention is the device for concentrating low-solubility materials called the soxhlet. There is a German patent from the 19th century, but archaeologists found one dating from ancient Mesopotamia.

Sometimes it is the other way, though. I think the Russians, Cuk if I am not mistaken, were who developed all of the second-order SMPS topologies, before there were semi-conductor switches to make them practical, a coupla decades before anyone else noticed, let alone competed. Few SMPS textbooks mention this.

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

johnbeetem — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 06:22:26 GMT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton

From what I've seen, there are very few truly original inventions. Most are based on a continuum of prior work, adapting old ideas to new technology as it becomes available. Many times there are multiple inventors working independently and simultaneously, but one gets lucky and makes something work first and that inventor gets all the credit as if the others never existed. Would we have the telephone without Alexander Graham Bell, the light bulb without Edison, the airplane without the Wright Brothers, or the car without Henry Ford? [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-0871d974-e9a7-428c-a1f1-1b3424a7f80c/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16] Of course we would -- others were working on the same problems at the same time and would have perfected the devices sooner rather than later. In many cases it's simply that an invention's time has come -- it's something people have wanted to do for a long time (like a flying machine) and the key technologies that it needs have finally become available (like a lightweight engine).

People lose track of ideas and when they're rediscovered people think they're new. My favorite example is the Shannon Expansion (1948) which is the same as Boole's "Development" (1854). Another example is Pascal's Triangle (1665) which was known to the Chinese and Persians in the 11th Century AD and the mathematics behind it go back to Indian mathematician Pingala (2nd Century BC).

Perhaps the greatest disaster to befall science was the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria in the early centuries AD. We've been spending the last 2000 years reïnventing the contents of that library.

JMO/YMMV

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

D_Hersey — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 23:13:49 GMT

I'll say that during the cold war that Chinese and Russian scientific developments seemed to be rarely attributed to them, especially in the popular media. There seems to be a nationalistic or ethic bias in scientific attribution, historically.

RE: No, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone

jw0752 — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 22:42:51 GMT

I have found that for my own sanity and health it is best to be willing to let go. Though not in the electronics area, there are currently 3 products on the market that were designed by my wife and me. One has a patent and all three are generating small royalty incomes. All three products have been sold to large marketers for manufacture and distribution. The problem of keeping control of the market however would have damaged my health if I had not been willing to turn control of the products over to the larger companies and then just let go.. Soon after each product came on the market, copies and clones began to show up and be marketed from other vendors. When appropriate the large companies wrote warning letters to these pirates and they had some effect but the market was never clean of counterfeit product. It is a dog eat dog world out there and the internet has only added to the ease with which ideas are distributed, used and stolen. The problems for the inventor today are many and the road from innovation to actually making money on that innovation is long and well populated with crooks and dead ends. My last product which could save the end users a lot of money and downtime currently sits on the shelf. While it is a fully functional device that has been test marketed I have not been able to get it to the national market. I will follow this thread with interest to see what experience others have had.

John