Abstract
HAVING observed in this week's NATURE a notice of a “mechanical telephone” said to be brought from America, I may state that so far back as 1878 I experimented on the transmission of sounds by wires, and communicated the results obtained, from a large number of experiments, to the Physical Society of London in March, 1878; the paper being afterwards published in the Philosophical Magazine for August, 1878. These experiments are referred to by the Count du Moncel in his book on “The Telephone,” published in 1879. I found no difficulty in carrying on a conversation through wires laid in various ways from room to room of a house; and musical sounds, breathing, and whistling were also readily transmitted, and through most unlikely arrangements, such as a common wire fence. Various materials were tried for the transmitting and receiving ends—disks of cardboard set in deepish rims being found to give excellent results with a No. 16 copper wire. In one of my experiments I found that the disks were not required, the wire itself picking up and transmitting the sounds. The results obtained were most interesting; but as the range was necessarily limited, it did not seem to me that there was much scope for practical application.
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MILLAR, W. A Mechanical Telephone. Nature 32, 316 (1885). https://doi.org/10.1038/032316c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/032316c0
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