Everything has an Origin by Trevor Homer

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The Book of Origins is for people who want to know how and when things began, where they came from, and why they started.

For instance, the telephone was invented in 1876 by Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) at the age of 29. He had succeeded in transmitting speech sounds the year before.

Elisha Gray (1835-1901) also invented the telephone in 1876, but Bell beat him to the Patent Office by just a few hours. A major court battle followed which went in favour of Bell. Unlike Bell, Gray had produced a working prototype in 1874, but neglected to patent it.

A Western Union internal memo of 1876 reads:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

Also:

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) is widely regarded as the father of radio, but he had in fact infringed seventeen patents previously registered by Serbian born Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Marconi’s US patent applications were initially turned down due to Tesla’s previous work in 1893, but in a major about-turn, Marconi was granted a patent for the invention of radio in 1904.

By 1901 Marconi had perfected a radio system, which was tested by transmitting Morse Code across the Atlantic.

Despite the award of the Nobel physics prize to Marconi in 1909, the patent for radio was reversed in favour of Tesla in 1943 a few months after Tesla’s death.

Nikola Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856 and granted American citizenship in 1891. He was a prolific inventor who worked with Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and George Westinghouse (1846-1914), and held more than seven hundred patents.

The first voice broadcast on radio was a message sent from Brant Rock, Massachusetts on Christmas Eve 1906 to Atlantic shipping. The speaker, Reginald Fessenden (1866-1932) had previously transmitted from station to station, (as opposed to broadcast), across the Potomac River in 1900.

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Trevor Homer

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