Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for July 21, 2022

…..and robo calls.

Bell invented a wireless telephone that he called a photophone and an early version of a metal detector,

He went to Nova Scotia to experiment with hydrofoils

Bell probably stole that from someone else, too.

The next year’s replacement phone. You gotta keep up with the latest phone fashions you know.

Anything worth inventing is worth paying for.

Ask Elisha Gray.

He invented the tetrahedral kite around 1900. His experiments included lifting a human being with a forty foot tetrahedral kite being towed by a ship.

fun fact. Mark Twain owned the first private phone in Hartford Connecticut. He hated the phone. he wrote a lot about what an invasive monster it was in people’s homes and he called the Hartford telephone exchange every day to complain about the phone. Think how much he’d hate social media.

Who did decide that phone calls should cost money? I wonder how long phone calls were free, or were they ever? I get that there would always be a charge for the equipment, but when was it decided, and by whom, that people could or should be charged for the service?

Bell: [Invents phone]. Phone: “We’ve been trying to reach you about your vehicle warranty”… Bell: [Smashes phone]

There’s a two part TV movie about Bell in which there’s a scene where an elderly Bell is working in his office, gets a phone call, and it’s a telemarketer. I seem to recall he yells something about not wanting to get the Sears Roebuck catalog, violently hangs up the phone, then rips the phone line out and chucks the phone out the door.

In 2002 US congress recognised Antonio Meucci, an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.

“He fell in love with long distance and hasn’t been heard from since!”

_______________Tennessee Williams, Glass Menagerie

Always go for how to monetize after you invent. Got to have a viable business model if it has any hope of success.

I would like to be able to read a newspaper at a bar while smoking a cigar. But we can’t smoke at bars (I’m actually in favor of that) and buying the very thin Chicago Tribune is now $3. So I guess I’ll sit with the other oldsters and stare at our phones while the bartender does the same.

No body invents anything that doesn’t cost anything. That’s why big utilities don’t want to take electricity out of the air like Nicola Tesla proposed.

An extended car warranty service.

He was soon to be on the receiving end when lip-reading, speaking, and sign language were used altogether.

Maybe he invented ATT. bad

photophone

Spam callers came next!

he wanted you to answer “AHOY”

Wait, wait, wait! Didn’t Don Ameche invent the telephone? I remember someone in an old-time movie mentioning that fact.

The busy signal!

He was trying to invent a hearing aid. Instead, he invented something that is very frustrating for those with hearing loss.

He invented the Hydrofoil boat, and co-founded the National Geographic Society.