Today In History: Alexander Graham Bell Invents Distracted Driving

Alexander Graham Bell, widely considered to be the the inventor of the first practical telephone, received the patent for the device on March 7, 1876. Coming from a long line of family members involved in the speech or phonetic fields, both of Bell's parents were deaf, and his father had developed Visible Speech, a system of phonetic (relating to speech sounds) symbols representing the position of the speech organs when making sounds. Visible Speech helped the deaf to improve their speaking and communication skills, as they could not hear their own pronunciations.

Bell was not the only inventor working on perfecting a patentable version of the telephone, but was the first to the patent office by, literally, a few hours (soon challenged by inventor, and over-sleeper, Elisha Gray). Gray then went into business with Thomas Edison working on their own telephone, and quickly had their pants sued off by Bell.

The electric telegraph, developed by William Morse in the mid-1800's, had allowed instant communication over long distances, but still required that senders and recipients go to a telegraph office to send or receive messages, or have them delivered. Either way, it didn't quite afford actual person-to-person communication, as it required at least one intermediary. The telephone, in theory, allowed for everyone to have their own communication device inside their own home.

Around the same time in the early 1880's, Karl Benz patented what is considered to be the first gasoline-powered production automobile. In the late 1940's, the automobile and the telephone were combined viably, if not primitively, for the first time by AT&T, with the subscriber equipment weighing around 80 pounds, and only allowing for 3 calls to be made in any city at any given time.

Though we can't exactly picture Bell and Benz colliding in the street Reese's Peanut Butter Cup-style ("You got your telephone in my automobile", "No, you got your automobile on my telephone"), through various twists and turns their respective inventions are intertwined today in ways they couldn't have imagined.

Put the phone down, and stay safe out there.....

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

Telephone - Wikipedia