Give me a bell. - Sepia Saturday

This week's prompt is entitled "Photograph of Women Working at a Bell System Telephone Switchboard".

So where better to start than with the man who started it all.

Alexander Graham Bell

(By Moffett Studio -Library and Archives Canada)

Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved to Ontario, and then to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. Bell's interest in education of deaf people  lead him to invent , in 1876, his "electrical speech machine," which we now call a telephone. News of his invention  spread quickly throughout USA and Europe. By 1878, Bell had set up the first telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut.

Those early telephones are worth their place in any Sepia Saturday post.

Bell Telephone - secure connection handset 1879

 (Source -Popular Science Monthly Volume 70 )

 

 Canada is obviously very proud of its connection (no pun intended) with Alexander Graham Bell as this plaque shows.

Plaque commemorating the conception of the telephone in Bell's Brantford, Ontario home in the summer of 1874.

("Courtesy of Harry Zilber")

This short video gives a biography of the great man.

Bell's biography

 

His invention has had a major impact on our lives even if so many these days walk around with a mobile (cell) phone glued to their ears.

Of cause celebrities soon got in on the act at places like this.

The Mayflower Hotel

(By bdking - CC BY 2.0)

There were a number of historic events that happened at the Mayflower.

• Charles Lindbergh celebrated his historic flight around the world in 1927
• Blonde Bombshell, Jean Harlow was so intrigued by the hotels switchboard, she spent a morning in 192 as a stand in operator 
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote the famous line "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself" in Suite 776 in 1933
• Harry W. Colmery drafted the original GI Bill on Mayflower stationery in Room 570 in 1943.
• FBI Director, J Edgar Hoover had the same lunch of buttered toast, cottage cheese and grapefruit, salad and chicken soup at the same table everyday for 20 years 
• Monica Lewinsky was deposed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1999 there during the Impeachment of then President Bill Clinton

 Bell would not have been aware of Jean Harlow's interest however as he died in 1922.

Bell Telephone Memorial, Alexander Graham Bell Park, Brantford, Ontario, Canada

 (Courtesy: Harry Zilber - 2009) 

 

 Before you all rush off you might like to listen to a "sweet" tribute to Alexander Graham Bell.

I hope you remember the line in his biography that he considered the telephone to be a blight on his life and he refused to have a telephone in his house.

Don't let this stop you from connecting with me and others over at Sepia-saturday-151  even if you can't give me a bell..