- Telephone
- Carpet Sweeper
- Phonograph
- Moving Pictures
Telephone
Alexander Gram Bell was inspired by the telegraph, and Joseph Henry, to invent the telephone. Henry gave Bell advice and encouragement when Bell told him about his idea. The telephone allows us to communicate across long distances. Bell went on to create Bell telephone company, or AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), but it was broke up into 7 “baby bells”, which later grouped together again to make the modern cell phone companies AT&T and VERIZON. Also, it was Bell labs that perfected cellular technology.
Carpet Sweeper
Melville Bissell was a successful store owner. He and his wife had a very successful crockery store, a store that sells pots, pans and the like. His wife, Anna Bissell, complained that it was really hard to get sawdust out of carpets. Melville invented the carpet sweeper for his wife. It uses the mechanical motion created by pushing the sweeper to power brushes which brush the sawdust into a containment unit. Anna became a saleswoman for the product. Then Melville suddenly died, and Anna took over the company. Bissell vacuum company is still around today.
Phonograph
Before he became an inventor, Thomas Edison saved the life of a three-year-old boy who was about to get run over. The boy’s father got Edison a job at Western Union telegraph company, although he was soon fired for doing experiments on his nightshift; however, the experiments helped him to perfect the phonograph. It records speech onto a cylinder that can then be played back later. Edison, with his fame and money from the phonograph, went on to invent other things, but Alexander Gram Bell (above) improved the process. The phonograph led to the vinyl record, which led to the radio, as well as much of the terminology used for digital audio today. Also, the phonograph led to moving pictures (below).
Moving Pictures
Edward Muybridge immigrated from England, and became a successful bookstore owner in San Francisco. Muybridge wanted to get some antique books from England. He was supposed to set sail for England, but missed his boat. So he took a stagecoach headed for Chicago, and from there would take a train to New York, and then a ship to England. But the stagecoach crashed in Texas, and Muybridge was injured in the head. He was taken to a fort in Arkansas until he could travel again. Then he went to England. He met a doctor there who recommended photography as a hobby. Muybridge grew fond of it, and returned to San Fransisco as a professional photographer. Then, a man named Stanford hired Muybridge to decide a bet: did all of a horse’s hooves leave the ground in a gallop? Well, Muybridge set up 20+ cameras in front of where the horse would gallop, and, sure enough, all the hooves left the ground. It was the first moving picture. Stanford won the bet.
Muybridge met with Thomas Edison, and Edison, using the idea of the phonograph (above), created a one-person moving picture machine. But Edison would not allow anyone to use his patents, and he would not improve the design himself. So the movie industry moved away from New Jersey, where Edison was, to Hollywood, as far away as they could get from his “legal hand”. There the movie industry started to prosper, and it is still the movie capital today.