BOB DAVIS ART

The Telephone

A. Background

The telephone was invented in 1888 by someone commonly referred to as Alexander Graham Bell (see below for the truth.) As an invention the machine was new and remarkable, however unusable until Bell's friends also had telephones of their own. Through time immemorial, people have tried to communicate over great distances, to no effect (from the bush drummers in africa to the note-on-the-end-of-a-flaming-arrow bowsmiths of the middle ages in Europe) but now Bell had put together the first practical means of achieving this end.

History of the Telephone

As was reported in the newspapers of the time, Bell had cobbled together 3 prior inventions, cleverly linking them together to create one new invention that he could call his own. These three prior inventions that Bell had nothing to do with include: the bell, wire and speech. While the bell had only been invented 2 millennia prior, and the wire in 1772, it turns out that speech, so necessary for the proper operation of Bell's new invention, the telephone, had actually been invented in an era predating the birth of Bell by 43 centuries. For Bell to claim full and complete, solo credit for the telephone struck his critics of the time as ridiculous. As Theodore Fipwhistle remarked in the New York Daily Bugle, on April 3, 1892, "I've been utilizing the grand invention of speech my entire life. And I was born well before Bell's so-called invention was sold to the masses. He's a snake-oil salesman, I tell's you, he is." Bell nonetheless prevailed in all of his patent lawsuits, and by 1903 he owned complete patent and copyright protection to the spoken version of the English Language. (Student Tip: This can be easily verified by students today in their online research: search for articles from 1888 until Bell's patents expired in 1922 and you will see that they are all in print, with not a single reference online to even a single spoken account. Try it, it'll be fun! Go here: generic search engine)

In 1996, with the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), Congress and the President declared certain types of speech broadcast over the telephone to be illegal, including swear words, sexual descriptions, pornographic exclamations, and un-american rants. In 2001 with the passage of the Patriot Spy Act, Congress, in deference to the awesome power of the President, declared all telephone communications to be illegal, and thus all telephones are now tapped to ensure compliance. Thus ending the inspiring "Century of the Phone" first initiated when Alexander Graham Bell called to his assistant, with the help of his new-fangled telephone, "damnit Watson, get in here and help me with this damn wiring diagram. I can't tell the blue lines from the green lines."

Size

The telephone has unprecedented market share in this world of ours called Earth: 72.7% of all people in the whole wide world own a telephone, and 99.334% have access to one within a 25 mile radius of their home or hovel. These numbers surpass even the wildest dreams and aspirations of the first marketing experts hired by AT&T (the original Ma Bell) in 1952.

Timeline

1203: Birth of August Bush III, distant relative of Alexander Graham Bell, George W. Bush, our 43rd President of the United States of America and Mercedes Citroen, inventor the automobile.

1888: Alexander Graham Bell invents the "telephone".

1892: Bell secures all patents and copyrights worldwide.

1896: Bell incorporates as Bell, Inc., a multi-national company located in Secaucus, New Jersey.

1903: American Telegraph purchases Bell, Inc. and becomes American Telegraph AND Telephone (emphasis added).

1904: Ma Bell (really Trudy Ducksworth from Alley, Connecticut) appears in the first ad for the newly formed "AT&T". Her power is immediately apparent to all who gaze on her visage, as all competitors forthwith throw in the towel, and a monopoly is born.

1932: The telephone is implicated in the Great Depression. Sarah Middlesworth of Canton, Ohio disagrees.

1934: Something is amiss in the republic, and the phone tries to find a way to come to the rescue. But it is not until;

1942: The telephone comes to the rescue of Allied war efforts in Europe. British spies working for George H.W. Bush (future CIA chief, ambassador to the "United Nations" and 41st President of the United States of America) decode Axis transmissions, and the war is soon declared over. AT&T receives the Congressional Medal of Honor, worn ever since by the succession of Ma Bells that replaced the original, Trudy Ducksworth, as CEO of the company.

1963: Lee Harvey Oswald calls his Soviet handlers prior to shooting President Kennedy.

1964: A new fad sweeps the nation: the game "telephone" where each person in a circle passes along a message to the next person in the circle, without the use of a telephone, thus prompting swift and quick lawsuits all across the country against children for using the copyrighted term "telephone" improperly and without permission.

1965: A new fad sweeps the nation: Princess Phones!

1991: Stuck on hold for over 43 hours, Steven Bigglesheath breaks the world's record and is rewarded with a transfer to the manager.

2003: George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America, War President, Peace President and reader to young children, becomes the latest in a long line of famous presidential defenders of consumers, scourge to multi-national corporations, and Teddy Roosevelt-style "trustbusters" by declaring the phone company a monopoly, and breaking them into the 7 regional Bells we know and love today. Especially SBC, our own "local" telephone company. We love SBC. Love, love love. Good SBC. good. ahhhhhh.

The Original Alexander Graham Bell Patents and Diagrams:

Telephone Company Information

Ma Bell is CEO, President, and Spokesmom for AT&T, also known as "the phone company." This is no longer true, as the company was broken up in 2003 by George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America. There are now 7 local phone companies and 43 long-distance companies, 50 total, of which 42 are partly or wholly owned subsidiaries of Halliburton. Halliburton also owns Kellogg Brown and Root, a foreign-based company that has business in Iraq, Iran and North Korea (also known as the "axis of evil" in the street parlance of our urban centers.)

The Truth about Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell's real name was Morty Fischer. His paternal Father was jewish, as was his maternal Mother, Sadie. He changed his name onboard ship while on route from Lvov, Lithuania when his Yiddish was misinterpreted by the Ship's Pursor. What he actually had said at the time was, 'Please, sir, may I have some more?" but the ship's crew spoke no yiddish, and had not read Dickens, and thus Bell was forced to renounce his Jewish heritage in 1902 at a meeting of the Famous Inventors Society of New York City or be sanctioned for falsifying patent papers.

Additional verified information about the telephone and Alexander Graham Bell can be found in the encyclopedia, or here.

This knowledge entry was written by BD, GTO and FCC.

If you are using this for a school paper, please remember to credit the "Bob Davis Knowledge Base"

last updated February 19, 2007

Send any email corrections you may have to the "webmaster":

bob
at
bobdavisart
dot
com