when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his assistant in another room by saying, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days before.
- Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a leading authority in public speaking and speech correction. The young Bell was trained to take over the family business, and while still a teenager he became a voice teacher and began to experiment in sound. In 1870, his family moved to Ontario, Canada, and in 1871 Bell went to Boston to demonstrate his father’s method of teaching speech to the deaf. The next year, he opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University
I hope not. It's kind of tragic from Gray's point of view. Scientific development goes on concurrently all over the world. Look at Tesla and Marconi. Somebody gets in first and is famous and sets the stage for the next 100 years. For reasons we do not know, the other guy shows up one day later and loses out.
If 8bitsamurai had been taken one minute earlier, you'd be ninebit or sevenbit today. How would you feel if 8bit called you and told you to eat dirt?
I'd wonder how 8bit got my phone number, haha.
The humor for me comes from the fact that it's a phone call. Plus it's not all bad, if melancholy:
- Gray's second place showing in the race to lay claim to the invention of the telephone did not tarnish his professional reputation however. In 1880 he was named professor of dynamic electricity at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he taught with distinction. Gray died in Newtonville, Massachusetts, in 1901. Discovered among his belongings was a note indicating a lingering disappointment concerning the telephone. It read, in part, "The history of the telephone will never be fully written.... It is partly hidden away ... and partly lying on the hearts and consciences of a few whose lips are sealed -- some in death and others by a golden clasp whose grip is even tighter."