Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone in Boston
Poets involved
What happened
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in Boston, Massachusetts, a device that converted sound waves into electrical signals transmitted over wires and then converted back into sound. Bell, a teacher of the deaf who was deeply interested in the physiology of speech and hearing, developed the telephone through experiments on the electrical transmission of vocal sounds at his laboratory in Boston. The device, first demonstrated publicly in June 1876, rapidly transformed personal and business communication across the world.
Literary impact
The telephone introduced the experience of hearing a distant voice as if it were present, an uncanny collapse of distance that became a powerful theme in late nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. The telephone's transformation of the human voice into electrical impulses raised profound questions about identity, presence, and the nature of speech that poets from Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologues anticipate the telephone's mediated voice, to T.S. Eliot would explore. In American literature, the telephone's disruption of privacy and creation of new forms of intimacy became themes in the works of writers from Mark Twain to William Carlos Williams.
Source: Wikipedia
