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Updated: May 15, 2025
All voice-sounds are made by two elastic bands or cushions, called vocal chords, stretched across the end of the tube or windpipe through which we breathe, and as we send the air through them we tighten or loosen them as we will, and so make them vibrate quickly or slowly and make sound-waves of different lengths.
Its invention has been frequently attributed to the discovery that a point attached to a telephone diaphragm would, under the effect of sound-waves, vibrate with sufficient force to prick the finger. The story, though interesting, is not founded on fact; but, if true, it is difficult to see how the discovery in question could have contributed materially to the ultimate accomplishment.
Everywhere in Europe also this fact was corroborated, and in some places even a seventh oscillation was recorded. The Greenwich record shows that the air-waves took about thirty-six hours to travel from pole to pole, thus proving that they travelled at about the rate of ordinary sound-waves, which, roughly speaking, travel at the rate of between six and seven hundred miles an hour.
Just close round my hands when I clap them, there is a small quantity of air, and so the shock I give it is very violent, but as the sound-waves spread on all sides they have more and more air to move, and so the air-atoms are shaken less violently and strike with less force on your ear. If we can prevent the sound-wave from spreading, then the sound is not weakened.
Munro's experiments have led him to the opinion that the action of the microphone must be attributed to the action of sonorous vibrations upon the air or gaseous medium separating the so-called contact-points of the electrodes, and that across these spaces, or films of gaseous matter, silent electrical discharges take place, the strengths of which, being determined by the thickness of the gaseous strata through which they pass, vary with the motion of the electrodes; and as, according to this hypothesis, the distances of the electrodes from one another is determined by the sound-waves, the sound in that way controls the current.
He said to himself, "The sound of my voice will give motion to a thin plate of iron as well as to a sheet of goldbeaters'-skin; and if I bring this vibrating plate of iron close to a magnet, the motion will set up in it waves of electricity answering exactly to the sound-waves which move the iron plate." So far, good. But something more was wanted.
By rotating the cylinder and by causing the diaphragm to vibrate under the effect of vocal or musical sounds, the needle-like point would form a series of indentations in the foil corresponding to and characteristic of the sound-waves.
I speak, and the movements of my vocal chords set up vibrations and sound-waves which, impinging upon the nerves of another's ear, affect in turn another's brain: and the process, regarded from the point of view of the physiologist or the scientific observer, is a physical process through and through: yet it mediates from my mind to the mind of him who hears me a meaning which is wholly spiritual.
It was pointed out in the patent that Bell discovered the great principle that electrical undulations induced by the vibrations of a current produced by sound-waves can be represented graphically by the same sinusoidal curve that expresses the original sound vibrations themselves; or, in other words, that a curve representing sound vibrations will correspond precisely to a curve representing electric impulses produced or generated by those identical sound vibrations as, for example, when the latter impinge upon a diaphragm acting as an armature of an electromagnet, and which by movement to and fro sets up the electric impulses by induction.
But sound comes slowly, taking five seconds to travel half a mile, and so all the sound-waves at each point of the two or three miles fall on our ear one after the other, and make the rolling thunder.
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