Download or read book The Birth and Early Years of the Bell Telephone System 1876 1880 written by Rosario Joseph Tosiello and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bell written by Robert V. Bruce and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reprint of the 1973 biography of the American inventor. Divided into pre-telephone, telephone, and post-telephone sections, also covers his work with the Smithsonian, the deaf, the National Geographic Society, and Science magazine. Paper edition ($12.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876 written by A. Edward Evenson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invention of the telephone is a subject of great controversy, central is which is the patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell on March 7, 1876. Many problems and questions surround this patent, not the least of which was its collision in the Patent Office with a strangely similar invention by archrival Elisha Gray. A flood of lawsuits followed the patent's issue; at one point the government attempted to annul Bell's patent and launched an investigation into how it was granted. From court testimony, contemporary accounts, government documents, and the participants' correspondence, a fascinating story emerges. More than just a tale of rivalry between two inventors, it is the story of how a small group of men made Bell's patent the cornerstone for an emerging telephone monopoly. This book recounts the little-known story in full, relying on original documents (most never before published) to preserve the flavor of the debate and provide an authentic account. Among the several appendices is the "lost copy" of Bell's original patent, the document that precipitated the charge of fraud against the Bell Telephone Company.

Download or read book The People s Network written by Robert MacDougall and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary citizens—farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs—established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks and companies—a struggle with an emerging corporate giant that has been almost entirely forgotten. The People's Network reconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings, exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy, and social practice in the creation of modern North American telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications, and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a turning point in the history of information networks. The competing businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity and local versus centralized power. Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight with big business, they fundamentally changed the way telecommunications were conceived.

Download or read book How America Got On line written by Alan Stone and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The telecommunications industry is the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy and a driving force of economic and social change worldwide. In this study of the interplay of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and public policy, the author of Wrong Number: The Breakup of AT&T traces the telecommunication industry's evolution from the invention of the telegraph to the introduction of the web. In the process he shows how once discrete communications sectors have converged in a new hypercommunications structure that is reshaping the world economy. In its interdisciplinary reach, the book examines engineering, judicial, legislative, and administrative developments as well as the internal policies and external relations of firms such as AT&T. Finally, and with appropriate caution, the author attempts to assess the probable future impact of telecommunications on public life.

Download or read book Bell Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude written by Robert V. Bruce and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent public personality, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone, teacher of the deaf, phonetician, showman and sage, was also a very private individual. With unrestricted access to Bell’s vast personal files, Robert V. Bruce takes the proper measure of Bell the man in this biography, which portrays Bell as intense, curious, struggling to overcome his very real limitations as a scientist and the negative effects of early fame (he invented the telephone while still in his 20s) and sheds light on 19th- and 20th-century technology and on Bell’s inventions, including tetrahedral construction, the bullet probe, the “vacuum jacket” (a precursor of the iron lung) and the telephone. Bruce also explores Bell’s research and experiments on the airplane, the phonograph and the hydrofoil, and offers detailed information about the long and dramatic battle waged by Bell and his backers to establish the legitimacy of their claims on the basic telephone patents. Bruce illuminates the field which Bell considered his foremost vocation, the teaching of the deaf, describing Bell’s friendship with Helen Keller, his marriage to a deaf girl to whom he had given lessons in speech, and his funding of The Volta Review, a journal concerned with the deaf and hard of hearing still in existence — like Bell’s other magazines, Science and National Geographic. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in biography. “Both a lucid picture of an extraordinary scientific career and an engaging account of a remarkable man... Professor Bruce doesn’t scant the astonishing variety of Bell’s interests and accomplishments, which ranged all the way from supporting important scientific periodicals... to teaching the deaf to speak and fighting for their right to do so... to inventing everything he could imagine... At the same time, he has given us an extremely candid personal picture of this titan of American technology.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times “The first full-scale life based on the voluminous Bell papers. It is an absorbing story... The technical trials and errors, Bell’s almost naive persistence, the actual components he worked with, are all attentively documented by Professor Bruce. We are, as well, given a vivid picture of the human environment out of which the telephone emerged, as one individual after another, each of immense importance to Bell, sought to advise, encourage, deter, rectify his failings or even defeat him... It is [in Bruce’s] account of Bell’s life after the telephone... that the man himself emerges... It becomes, as the author writes, a study not of long adversity culminating in a final crescendo of triumph, the usual pattern for heroic tales, but of a long personal struggle against the deadening handicap of early fame... As it turns out, Bell’s post-telephone days, from 1876 to August, 1922, when he died at age 75, were in many ways his best.” — David McCullough, New York Times Book Review “The brilliant Scottish immigrant’s story is more complicated, and more fascinating, than his myth. This authoritative, scientifically informed biography vividly portrays a man who, unlike his single-minded contemporary Thomas Edison, was a divided genius.” — Newsweek “Until now, Alexander Graham Bell has been eclipsed by that invention which so changed communication that it is among the few which can genuinely be called revolutionary. Here he emerges not as a myth but as a man.” — Los Angeles Times “Bruce has written the first fully documented biography of Alexander Graham Bell... a lengthy portrayal of a man gifted with intelligence, imagination, and energy pursuing a wide range of interests... It seems likely that Bruce’s narrative account of Bell’s invention of the telephone — with its shadings and emphasis — will be the definitive one.” — Thomas Parker Hughes, Science “The result of a decade of study with the blessing and help of Bell’s descendants, this is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and handsomely researched biography of Bell since C. D. MacKenzie’s 1928 work... Throughout the enormous detail of this biography, Bell’s restless intellectual energy and breakthrough fever emerge. A gargantuan work — sure to be a basic reference for both future admirers and detractors.” — Kirkus Reviews “Robert V. Bruce has written an admirable and much needed biography of Alexander Graham Bell... Based on the vast collection of Bell’s papers held at the National Geographic Society in Washington and exhaustively supplemented by other sources, it is the first full-scale biography of the man whose invention changed the world.” — Patrick O’Dowd, Isis “A definitive biography of [Alexander Graham Bell]... From [the] mass of source material available to him, Bruce has skillfully and faithfully extricated a genuine personality and has forced Bell off the pedestal to which his own contemporaries had assigned him.” — Joseph Frazier Wall, Business History Review “[A] carefully researched biography... from family correspondence especially Bruce has distilled skillfully the dreams, the disappointments, and the foibles of a determined inventor in his moments of triumph and distress... the author’s assertive style, brightened by flashes of wry humor, and frequent sketches reproduced from Bell’s lab notebooks help make this in depth analysis of a notable American inventor profitable reading.” — Hugo A. Meier, Journal of American History

Download or read book Invented by Law written by Christopher Beauchamp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 stands as one of the great touchstones of American technological achievement. Bringing a new perspective to this history, Invented by Law examines the legal battles that raged over Bell’s telephone patent, likely the most consequential patent right ever granted. To a surprising extent, Christopher Beauchamp shows, the telephone was as much a creation of American law as of scientific innovation. Beauchamp reconstructs the world of nineteenth-century patent law, replete with inventors, capitalists, and charlatans, where rival claimants and political maneuvering loomed large in the contests that erupted over new technologies. He challenges the popular myth of Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers. More than anyone else, it was the courts that anointed Bell father of the telephone, granting him a patent monopoly that decisively shaped the American telecommunications industry for a century to come. Beauchamp investigates the sources of Bell’s legal primacy in the United States, and looks across the Atlantic, to Britain, to consider how another legal system handled the same technology in very different ways. Exploring complex questions of ownership and legal power raised by the invention of important new technologies, Invented by Law recovers a forgotten history with wide relevance for today’s patent crisis.

Download or read book The Telegraph in America 1832 1920 written by David Hochfelder and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete history of how the telegraph revolutionized technological practice and life in America. Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity. The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information—speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. With this book, Hochfelder supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.

Download or read book A Nation Transformed by Information written by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-10 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the startling case that North Americans were getting on the "information highway" as early as the 1700's, and have been using it as a critical building block of their social, economic, and political world ever since. By the time of the founding of the United States, there was a postal system and roads for the distribution of mail copyright laws to protect intellectual property, and newspapers, books, and broadsides to bring information to a populace that was building a nation on the basis of an informed electorate. In the 19th century, Americans developed the telegraph, telephone, and motion pictures, inventions that further expanded the reach of information. In the 20th century they added television, computers, and the Internet, ultimately connecting themselves to a whole world of information. From the beginning North Americans were willing to invest in the infrastructure to make such connectivity possible. This book explores what the deployment of these technologies says about American society. The editors assembled a group of contributors who are experts in their particular fields and worked with them to create a book that is fully integrated and cross-referenced.

Download or read book The Visible Hand written by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution. The managerial revolution, presented here with force and conviction, is the story of how the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of market forces. Chandler shows that the fundamental shift toward managers running large enterprises exerted a far greater influence in determining size and concentration in American industry than other factors so often cited as critical: the quality of entrepreneurship, the availability of capital, or public policy.

Download or read book Manufacturing Knowledge written by Richard Gillespie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What motivates workers to work harder? What can management do to create a contented and productive workforce? Discussion of these questions would be incomplete without reference to the Hawthorne experiments, one of the most famous pieces of research ever conducted in the social and behavioral sciences. Drawing on the original records of the experiments and the personal papers of the researchers, Richard Gillespie has reconstructed the intellectual and political dynamics of the experiments as they evolved from the tentative experimentation to seemingly authoritative publications. Manufacturing Knowledge raises fundamental questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, and about the assumptions and evidence that underlay debates on worker productivity.

Download or read book Thomas Edison written by Paul Israel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prolific inventor in American history, Thomas Edison played a major role in creating industries that have altered life around the globe: electric light and power, recorded sound and motion pictures. He also made significant innovations in telecommunications, battery technology, office machinery, the manufacture of Portland Cement, and processes for working low-grade ores. He was able to contribute to such a wide array of industries because he was not a lone inventor. At his workshops and laboratories in Newark, Menlo Park, and West Orange in New Jersey, Edison brought together teams of skilled research assistants and machinists. These teams allowed him to do more than any one person could do. In the process he transformed invention by making it part of a larger process of research, development, and commercialization that we now call innovation. That transformation—as much as any single invention—has become a crucial feature of the modern world. Includes a detailed chronology of Edison’s life and work. An introduction that provides an overview of Edison’s life and work. The A-to-Z section includes three hundred encyclopedic entries on Edison’s inventions, laboratories, business enterprises, public image and numerous individuals with whom he was associated. An extensive bibliography of Edison’s publications and select interviews; modern, contemporaneous, and juvenile biographies; and thirteen subject areas related to Edison’s work and influence. The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.

Download or read book The Development Of Large Technical Systems written by Renate Mayntz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an outcome of the conference on the development of large technical systems held in Berlin in 1986. It focuses on the comparative analysis of the development of large technical systems, particularly electrical power, railroad, air traffic, telephone, and other forms of telecommunication.

Download or read book The Intellectual Property of Nations written by Laura R. Ford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on macro-historical sociological theories, this book traces the development of intellectual property as a new type of legal property in the modern nation-state system. In its current form, intellectual property is considered part of an infrastructure of state power that incentivizes innovation, creativity, and scientific development, all engines of economic growth. To show how this infrastructure of power emerged, Laura Ford follows macro-historical social theorists, including Michael Mann and Max Weber, back to antiquity, revealing that legal instruments very similar to modern intellectual property have existed for a long time and have also been deployed for similar purposes. Using comparative and historical evidence, this groundbreaking work reflects on the role of intellectual property in our contemporary political communities and societies; on the close relationship between law and religion; and on the extent to which law's obliging force depends on ancient, written traditions.

Download or read book The Tangled Web of Patent 174 465 written by Russell A. Pizer and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tangled Web of Patent #174,465 is a story that involves an individual who has been called one of America's inventive geniuses. He has been held in the highest regard as the inventor of the telephone. However, careful scrutiny of hundreds of documents that include thousands of pages of sworn testimony before a Congressional investigations committee beginning in April of 1886, show that A.G. Bell was a party to what might be considered one of America's most far-reaching historical deceptions. With all due respect to A.G. Bell, he was not the actual perpetrator of this historic fraud. The culprit in this historical subterfuge was A. G. Bell's father-in-law: Gardiner Greene Hubbard.--

Download or read book The Bell System and Regional Business written by Kenneth Lipartito and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Public Service Liberalism written by Alan Stone and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying a form of government intervention in social and economic affairs called public service liberalism, Alan Stone looks to that ideology to confront the problems of the 1990s and beyond. He shows in this fascinating case study that the policy has been effective in the past: the American telephone industry from its inception until 1934 is an illustration of how public service liberalism served both economic efficiency and a complex structure of public values. Stone depicts the stages by which public service liberalism was replaced by less adequate policies and suggests ways that it could be successfully restored. Furthermore, Stone demonstrates that government-business relationships like the one that prevailed in the telephone industry were common in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. He argues that this period was not an era of laissez-faire, as is often alleged, but that its economic energy and extraordinary technological progress were accompanied by complete acceptance of certain kinds of government intervention. Challenging the presuppositions not only of the new ideologists of deregulation, privatization, and competition but also of the practitioners of what he calls the "sanctimonious muddle" of present-day liberalism, Stone demonstrates that public service liberalism could help resolve current problems, such as those in the savings and loan institutions and the cable television industry. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.