via slate.com
The foundational phone—Alexander Graham Bell’s “speaking telephone,” exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia—was less a product than a lab experiment in a box: A needle transmitting, via sulfuric acid, the vibrations of the voice to an electromagnetic receiver. Apart from looking of its age—you catch a whiff of Victorian steampunk here—there’s little to indicate what it does (Bell’s own patent referred to “improvements in telegraphy”). The flared tubular column could be a speaking tube, or it could be the megaphone of some new-fangled Victrola.
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