1875 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
Elisha Gray of Western Electric Company files a patent application February 23 for a multiple harmonic telegraph (see 1874), but Alexander Graham Bell, 28, creates an electric telephone that will revolutionize communication. The Scottish-born inventor came to the United States in 1871 as a teacher of speech to the deaf, using his father's method of "Visible Speech" (sign language) at the Clarke school established at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1867 and the American Asylum for the Deaf at Hartford, Connecticut. South Danvers, Massachusetts-born leather merchant Thomas Sanders, now 35, engaged Bell in late 1873 to give lessons in Visible Speech to his 5-year-old hearing-impaired son George. Bell has been living with the boy and his mother at a grandmother's house in Salem, and he conceived the idea of "electric speech" last year while visiting his parents at Brantford, Ontario. He has signed an agreement February 27 with Sanders and Clarke School chairman Gardiner G. Hubbard, now 52, to obtain financing for his experiments (see education [Hubbard], 1867). While trying to perfect a method for carrying more than two messages simultaneously over a single telegraph line, Bell hears the sound of a plucked spring along 60 feet of wire June 2 in the attic of Charles Williams's electrical shop at 109 Court Street, Boston. The spring has been plucked by Bell's young assistant Thomas A. Watson, a machinist who is trying to reactivate a harmonic telegraph transmitter, one of several whose reeds or springs are each tuned to a different signal frequency: a contact screw has been screwed down so far that a circuit has been left unbroken that should have been broken only intermittently, and a current is being transmitted that corresponds to a reed in Bell's room. When the sound of the plucked spring sets off a vibration in his eardrum he recognizes its significance and realizes that a speaking telephone can be achieved by means of a simple mechanism (see 1876).
Inventor Thomas A. Edison perfects the first duplicating process to employ a wax stencil. Having developed quadruplex telegraphy, Edison has been experimenting with paraffin paper for possible use as telegraph tape and will receive a patent next year for "a method of preparing autographic stencils for printing." Edison will improve the process and obtain a second patent in 1880 (see Mimeograph, 1887; phonograph, 1877).
New York printing press manufacturer Richard M. Hoe invents a high-speed newspaper folding apparatus (see 1870).
The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram begins publication at Alexandria August 5. Lebanese Christians Bishara and Salim Takla have started the four-page weekly tabloid; it will become a daily in 1881, a broadsheet in 1881, and move its operations to Cairo in November 1900.
The Statesman begins publication at Delhi under the direction of English-born publisher Robert Knight, whose sons Paul and Robert will take over the newspaper after his death in 1890. The first paper to sell for 1 anna (others cost 4), it will maintain its price for 67 years and will be published at Calcutta (Kolkata) as well as at Delhi.
The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo has its beginnings in the paper A Provincia de São Paulo founded by 17 men with the slogan "Representation and Justice." It works to abolish slavery and will soon be taken over by Julio de Mesquita, who will publish it until his death in 1927.
The Chicago Daily News begins publication under the direction of men who include former Chicago Tribune reporter Melville Elijah Stone, 27. The four-page, five-column paper is the city's first penny daily; the competition charges a nickel, and since so many things are priced at 5¢ not many pennies are in circulation; Stone convinces some local merchants to price goods at $1.99, $2.99, and so forth, arguing that impulse buyers will think they are getting bargains, and when the merchants complain that they lack pennies to make change Stone travels to Philadelphia and returns with several barrels of pennies purchased from the U.S. Mint. Financier Victor F. Lawson will become business manager next year, attract well-known writers, and wind up owning two-thirds of its stock. The paper will have a circulation of more than 200,000 by 1888, when Lawson acquires full ownership; Frank Knox will buy the paper in the early 1930s, and publication will continue until 1978.
N. W. Ayer & Son offers advertisers "open contracts" that give them access to the true rates charged by newspapers and religious journals (see 1868). Rates have been set up to now by advertising agents who charged whatever the traffic would bear, but Ayer will act as the advertiser's agent rather than the newspaper's agent (see Rowell, 1869; Batten, 1891; ANPA resolution, 1893).
Former journalist and businessman Duff Green dies at Dalton, Georgia, June 10 at age 83; telegraphy pioneer and physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone at Paris October 19 at age 73.
The first American-made Christmas cards appear at Boston (see Cole, 1843). German-born lithographer Louis Prang, 51, has been publishing $6 reproductions of famous works of art ("chromos") since 1865. He makes the cards for the English trade, but he will now concentrate on introducing Christmas cards in America, developing a market that he will dominate until 1890, when cheaper imports from Germany will put him out of business (see Hallmark, 1910).