I have read somewhere that the resistance offered by a wire … is affected by the tension of the wire. If this is so, a continuous current of electricity passed through a vibrating wire should meet with a varying resistance, and hence a pulsatory action should be induced in the current … [corresponding] in amplitude, as well as in rate of movement, to the vibrations of the string … [Thus] the timbre of a sound [a quality essential to intelligible speech] could be transmitted … [and] the strength of the current can be increased ad libitum without destroying the relative intensities of the vibrations.
- - Alexander Graham Bell in a letter to Gardiner Greene Hubbard, May 4, 1875.
Quoted in “Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude” by Robert V. Bruce, 1973.
|
|
|
Comments are closed
