Alexandra Palace, London—later the first home of BBC Television—is opened.
June 3
Intelligible speech transmitted by Alexander Graham Bell using a magnetic microphone.
l
Electric picture systems using mosaics of selenium photocells proposed by Ayrton and
Perry in England and by George R Carey of Boston, USA.
l
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) invents the wax stencil mimeograph duplicator.
l
The Universal Postal Union is established at Bern, Switzerland.
1876
Numbers after entries link to the list of references.
links and notes
February 14
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) applies for a patent on his telephone apparatus,
three hours before Elisha Gray files a caveat at the Patent Office for his as yet unperfected device.
February 18
Direct telegraph link is established between Britain and New Zealand.
March 7
Bell telephone system is patented in the US.
March 10
First practical use of a voice telephone system by Alexander Graham Bell at 5 Exeter
Place, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Bell says to his assistant: 'Mr Watson, come here. I want you.'
June 25
First public demonstration of Bell’s speaking telephone is given at Centennial
Exhibition, Philadelphia, USA.
1877
April 18
Charles Cros writes a paper for the Académie des
Sciences in Paris (deposited there on 30 April but not opened until 5 December) about his idea for
a process which 'consists in obtaining traces of the movements to and fro of a vibrating membrane
and in using this tracing to reproduce the same vibrations, with their intrinsic relations of duration
and intensity, either by means of the same membrane or some other one equally adapted to produce the
sounds which result from this series of movements', using a disc as the recording medium. Cros could
not secure funds to make and patent the idea.
Article describing Charles Cros’s invention (see April 18)
in La Semaine du Clergé by Abbé Lenoir uses the word 'phonograph' to describe it.
November 29
Thomas Edison makes drawings of his idea for a cylinder phonograph, which he gives
to John Kruesi to execute.
December 1
Construction begins of a working prototype phonograph from Edison's drawings.
December 6
Edison records 'Mary had a little lamb' onto a cylinder wrapped with tin foil on his newly
completed prototype hand-cranked phonograph at Menlo Park, NJ—the earliest recording of a human voice.
Muybridge succeeds in taking a sequence
of 12 photographs of a horse in motion, which triggers shutters by means of trip-wires as it
passes; photographs incidentally produce serial analysis of motion. The apparatus is later
doubled and re-doubled to take 24 and then 48 images.
Senlecq transmits projected images by his Teletroscope.
l
Frenchman Emile Reynaud (1844-1907) improves the Zoëtrope into the Praxinoscope,
a projector of moving images.
l
Edison designs a transducer using granules of carbonised hard coal, for use in a
carbon microphone (still used a century later).
In Germany, E W Siemens invents the moving coil loudspeaker.
1878
January 14
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne
House, Isle of Wight; she hears a concert relayed by telephone.
January 28
First telephone exchange opens at New Haven, Connecticut. The telephone company
currently has 21 subscribers.
February 19
Edison is granted a US patent (no 200521) for his
tin-foil cylinder phonograph.
February 21
First telephone directory in the US is issued at New Haven, Connecticut, listing
50 subscribers.
April
Photographic plates coated with gelatine emulsion are offered for sale in England
by the Liverpool Dry-plate Company and by Wratten & Wainwright.
May 13
Thomas Edison receives a letter from Uriah Painter (his patent agent?) in
Washington DC reading: 'Hurrah for the telephonoscope. I'll get patent on it for you promptly
as the others.' However, unlike Du Maurier's visionary cartoon,
it appears to be an improved ear trumpet in which a paper funnel around a wire spiral—like the
rifling in a gun barrel—captures the sound, which is carried to the ear through a rubber tube.
l
Letter to the British science journal Nature from London barrister
Wordsworth Donnisthorpe (1847-1914) proposes a mechanism that would link the phonograph with moving
picture images.
Cartoon by George du Maurier in Punch’s Almanac for 1879
captioned ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope (transmits light as well as sound)’ shows a wide-screen videophone
conversion between London and Ceylon. It is barely a year since Edison's first major invention and
much more advanced than Edison's own idea for a 'telephonoscope'.
Click on picture to enlarge
l
Edison commissions 600 tin-foil phonographs from several workshops to circulate
for demonstration purposes. He experiments with disc recording but rejects it. He then apparently
loses interest in sound recording until competition emerges almost a decade later.
l
Carbon filament incandescent lamp invented in UK by J W Swan with collaboration
of C H Stearn (high vacua production expert), F Topham (glass-blower) and C F Cross (who discovered
the viscose process for the nitro-cellulose filament fibres).
l
Arthur-Louis Ducos Du Hauron publishes Photographie en Couleur, in which he
develops practical proposals for the subtractive approach to colour photography that he first outlined
in 1869.
l
Telephone apparatus are manufactured in Japan based on the Bell design by the
Ministry of Transport, Communications and Industries (Kobusho).
l
Cathode ('molecular') rays described by Sir W Crookes in the Bakerian Lecture and
the following year in the British Association Lecture.
l
In France, d'Arlincourt devises a photo-telegraphy system that is subsequently
tested at the Central Telegraph Office in London.
l
American engineer Oberlin Smith invents a magnetic recorder. It is not developed
commercially. [1888??]
l
International Literary and Artistic Association formed.
1879
August 28
First British telephone exchange opens at Coleman Street, London.
November 18
Eugen Skladanowsky presents the first public projection of photographs in the
Floria Theatre, Berlin.
December 20
Electric lamp invented by Thomas Edison is first demonstrated.
l
Ferrier makes the first photographic roll film in France, coating gelatin-bromide
emulsion onto a flexible strip of gelatin.
l
George Eastman invents a machine to make photographic dry plates, which he patents in
London.
l
Eadweard Muybridge develops an improved Zoetrope, called
the Zoögyroscope, to show his stop motion photographs.
Chronomedia index
Click to see the cartoons
Cartoon by George du Maurier in Punch’s Almanac for 1879
captioned ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope (transmits light as well as sound)’ shows a wide-screen videophone
conversion between London and Ceylon. It is barely a year since Edison's first major invention and
much more advanced than