On this day, in 1876,the first discernible speech was transmitted over a telephone when Alexander Graham Bell contacted his assistant in another room by saying, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you."
In 1875, while working on his multiple harmonic telegraph, Bell developed the basic ideas for the telephone.
He designed a device to transmit speech vibrations electrically between two receivers and in June 1875 tested his invention.
No intelligible words were transmitted, but sounds resembling human speech were heard at the receiving end.
Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days before.
In May, he publicly demonstrated the invention before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, and in June at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
In October, he successfully tested his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport.
In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company with two investors, and the first commercial applications of the telephone took place.
Cut to 2010.
On Saturday, a woman talking on a cell phone during a movie didn't take kindly to being "shushed" by another moviegoer.
Or at least her boyfriend didn't, as he allegedly attacked the "shusher".
Deputies say that while the movie was playing, a woman was talking on her phone and the victim asked her to turn it off.
The victim was attacked by the woman's boyfriend and another man, and was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.
The stabbing victim is expected to survive and is recovering at a hospital.
Two others who tried to help the victim also were injured.
There was no word on why the man had a meat thermometer in a movie theater.
See what you started, Mr. Bell?
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.” ---- John Stuart Mill
“People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization” ---- Agnes Repplier
