The next time you're distracted by the ringing of someone's cell phone, consider this: Washington is the birthplace of the blessing -- or the curse -- of wireless telephony.
This Friday marks the 125th anniversary of the world's first wireless telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell already had compiled an impressive record, inventing a telephone in 1876 and supervising the 1878 establishment of Washington's telephone exchange, one of the first in the world. But after moving to Washington in 1879, Bell became nearly obsessed with improving on his famous invention by doing away with the wire.
On June 3, 1880, Bell's collaborator, Charles Sumner Tainter, set a transmitter atop the Franklin School, a building that still stands at 13th and K streets NW. With Bell manning a receiver in his laboratory 700 feet away at 1325 L St. NW, Tainter uttered the less-than-immortal words, "Mr. Bell, if you hear what I say, come to the window and wave your hat."
Incredibly, 15 years before Guglielmo Marconi's first successful radio transmissions, Tainter saw the hat wave.
Bell's device relied not on radio waves but on sunlight. His "photophone" used an array of mirrors and lenses, with the vibrations from the speaker's voice modulating a beam of polarized light.
A parabolic reflector at the receiving end collected the beam, focusing it on a selenium cell that converted the modulations into electrical signals. The signals fed to a telephone earpiece and became sound.
Writing to his parents about his triumph, Bell professed little interest in reaping the rewards of his achievement. "I expect -- as a matter of course -- that half a hundred competitors for the honor of the invention will appear -- and attempt to rob me of all credit. However, I don't care," he wrote. "I have worked for the result and not for the glory -- and I am happy in my triumph over the difficulties of the task I had set myself."
In the same letter, however, Bell urged his parents to keep his breakthrough confidential until his August lecture at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Bell feared that "there will be hundreds of persons to work [the photophone] up into practical usefulness" once he divulged its invention.
In reality, despite the protestations to his parents, Bell intended to exploit the photophone's commercial potential. He was not a reluctant promoter. In a December 1880 lecture before the London Society of Telegraph Engineers, the inventor boasted that he had made "a beam of sunlight laugh, cough and sing."
He likewise stoked interest in his invention with his prognostications that it would become indispensable for ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications, as well as in military applications. "When Electric Photophony is practiced in warfare," he claimed, "the electric communications of an army could neither be cut nor tapped."
Certain of success but fearful of infringing competitors, Bell and Tainter obtained a patent for the photophone in December 1880, but not before sealing a copy of their invention in a tin box and depositing it with the Smithsonian for safekeeping.
Bell's predictions, however, proved wildly optimistic, as deficiencies in the design -- most notably, the photophone's reliance on sunlight -- rendered it a technological dead end rather than a gold mine. (When the tin box was unsealed in the presence of Bell's daughter and grandson in 1937, the contents were purely a historical curiosity.) Undaunted, Bell moved on to other pursuits, including the invention of an early iron lung.
