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125 Years of Chat


by Jan Hybertz Gøricke

On 14th February 2001 it was 125 years since the American of Scottish origin, Alexander Graham Bell, applied for a patent in respect of his invention of the telephone.


Bell handed in his application at the patent office in Boston just about two hours before another inventor, Elisha Grey, turned up in the same place with a temporary application for a patent without a functioning model. A few days later, both inventors were informed that their applications could not be accepted. They clashed with each other.

Knowing that the patent would be granted to Bell, Grey abstained from handing in a functioning model and desisted from doing anything further in the case. Grey thought at the time that the telephone was of no commercial value compared with the telegraph.

The patent on the telephone was issued to Bell on 7th March 1876. Three months later he demonstrated his invention at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia. The demonstration became the first of a large number of similar draws all over the world during the following years.

The Telephone Comes to Denmark
The novelty value of the telephone was considerable. On Monday the 10th of December 1877 in Kolding it was possible to attend the telephone being "presented and explained in the theatre hall" by telegraph operators M. Petersen, P. Rasmussen, and Jorgensen. The presentation was one of several around the country. In addition to this came the experiments of a number of telegraph people with the telephone which had been carried through via the existing telegraph lines with permission from the State Telegraph.

On the day of the presentation of the telephone Kolding Folkeblad [local newspaper] brought a thorough description of "one of the strangest inventions of our time, the telephone or the speech telegraph". In the article the telephone was described as an "extraordinarily simple apparatus" which most likely did not correspond to the understanding many of the readers of the newspaper was left with after having read about it. It was an electric apparatus by which you could communicate directly with each other orally and without any special qualifications over distances of several miles.

A Fatal Misjudgement
The presentations all over the country engendered several private initiatives. However, the director of the telegraph service, Heinrich Hoencke, did not consider the telephone a threat against the telegraph as in its early years the telephone was unsuitable for long-distance communication. To Heinrich Hoencke the telephone was therefore just an "interesting toy". This statement has been the laughingstock of posterity as it is a well-known fact that things turned out in a completely different way. So far, it has resulted in 125 years of chat on and about the telephone concurrently with its still more fantastic development and expansion.


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