Victorian Phone Book
Rosham Rosebure
In the 1870s, Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell was working at the Clarke Institute for Deaf Mutes, Northampton, Massachusetts. There he met the president of the institute, a prominent patent lawyer called Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
This device was designed as an improvement on conventional telegraphy, not as a telephone. Nevertheless, Bell began to speculate about the possibility of being able to hold conversations over long distances.
If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech.
Both Bell and Hubbard knew that another inventor, Elisha Gray, was also working on telephony. Hubbard urged Bell to patent the principle of speech transmission as soon as possible, thereby gaining exclusive rights to its development.
Others, including the American inventor Thomas Edison and the Welsh-born physicist David Hughes, developed improved microphones that made it easier to hear what was being said. Telephones spread rapidly from offices into homes.
In the early days of the telephone network, the user would simply lift the receiver, allowing the phone hook to complete a circuit and connect to the operator, and then ask to be connected to a particular telephone number.
In 1889, Almon Strowger designed a device to connect one caller to another without needing an operator to intervene. The first automatic telephone exchange using his design was opened in Indiana in 1891, and the system was widely adopted in its developed form in both Britain and the USA.
A downloadable policy template for Victorian government schools is available on the department's intranet at the School Policy Templates PortalExternal Link (staff login required). Schools can adapt the template to suit their local circumstances provided that it is consistent with this Ministerial policy.
Wearable devices, iPads and other personal devices are excluded from the policy, however, if they are brought to school, students must switch off all notifications during the school day. Schools may choose to include wearable devices, iPads and other personal devices as part of their local policies.
Schools will enforce the policy under their existing student engagement policies, for example, through detention or a loss of school-based privileges, where students fail to comply with the local school policy on mobile phones, including if they refuse to relinquish their phones to school staff when asked.
Where students have relinquished their mobile phones to school staff, schools are expected to return them to the student or parent/carer at the end of the school day. This is to support student safety when travelling to and from school, during which times carrying a mobile phone may help to manage risks of harm
Mobile phone
For the purpose of this policy, a mobile phone is a telephone with access to a cellular (telecommunication) system, with or without a physical connection to a network.
Mobile phone and seatbelt detection cameras target drivers who use portable devices such as a mobile phones while driving. They also can pick up drivers and front seat passengers not wearing their seatbelt.
Each camera trailer has 2 cameras and an infra-red flash that are enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) software. The cameras take high-resolution images any time of the day or night, and in all traffic and weather conditions.
The government values protecting the privacy of drivers and passengers and will continue to work closely with the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner to ensure the cameras operate in compliance with privacy obligations.
The Victorian Government has invested $33.7 million to support the implementation of the Mobile Phone and Seatbelt Detection Camera technology as a part of the Victorian Road Safety Strategy 2021-2030
This history of the telephone chronicles the development of the electrical telephone, and includes a brief overview of its predecessors. The first telephone patent was granted to Alexander Graham Bell in 1869.
Before the invention of electromagnetic telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech and music over a greater distance. This distance was greater than that of normal direct speech. The earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media.[1] The acoustic tin can telephone, or "lovers' phone", has been known for centuries.[1] It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the wire (and not by a modulated electric current). The classic example is the children's toy made by connecting the bottoms of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with tautly held string.[1][2]
Some of the earliest known experiments were conducted by the British physicist and polymath, Robert Hooke, from 1664 to 1685.[1][3] An acoustic string phone made in 1667 has been attributed to him.[4] An early version was also found in use by the Chimu in Peru. The gourd and stretched-hide version resides in the Smithsonian Museum collection and dates back to around the 7th century AD.[5]
For a few years in the late 1800s, acoustic telephones were marketed commercially as a competitor to the electrical telephone. When the Bell telephone patents expired and many new telephone manufacturers began competing, acoustic telephone makers quickly went out of business. Their maximum range was very limited.[2] An example of one such company was the Pulsion Telephone Supply Company created by Lemuel Mellett in Massachusetts, which designed its version in 1888 and deployed it on railroad right-of-ways.
The telephone emerged from the making and successive improvements of the electrical telegraph. In 1804, Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo constructed an electrochemical telegraph.[7] The first working telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity.[8] An electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling in 1832. Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber built another electromagnetic telegraph in 1833 in Gttingen. At the University of Gttingen, the two had been working together in the field of magnetism. They built the first telegraph to connect the observatory and the Institute of physics, which was able to send eight words per minute.[9]
The electrical telegraph was first commercialized by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway in England. It ran for 13 mi (21 km) from Paddington station to West Drayton and came into operation on April 9, 1839.
Another electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signaling alphabet with Morse. America's first telegraph was sent by Morse on January 6, 1838, across 2 miles (3 km) of wiring.
Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time to time. Antonio Meucci, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray amongst others, have all been credited with the telephone's invention. The early history of the telephone became and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge number of lawsuits filed in order to resolve the patent claims of the many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, were commercially decisive, because they dominated telephone technology and were upheld by court decisions in the United States.
The modern telephone is the result of the work of many people.[10] Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone, as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. Johann Philipp Reis coined the term "telephon".[11] Models of it were sent abroad, to London, Dublin, Tiflis, and other places. It became a subject for popular lectures, and an article for scientific cabinets. Edison credited him as the "first inventor of the telephone."[12]The Italian inventor and businessman Antonio Meucci has been recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives for his contributory work on the telephone.[13] Several other controversies also surround the question of priority of invention for the telephone.
The Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy considers the question of whether Bell and Gray invented the telephone independently and, if not, whether Bell stole the invention from Gray. This controversy is narrower than the broader question of who deserves credit for inventing the telephone, for which there are several claimants.
The Canadian Parliamentary Motion on Alexander Graham Bell article reviews the controversial June 2002 United States House of Representatives resolution recognizing Meucci's contributions 'in' the invention of the telephone (not 'for' the invention of the telephone). The same resolution was not passed in the U.S. Senate, thus labeling the House resolution as "political rhetoric". A subsequent counter-motion was unanimously passed in Canada's Parliament 10 days later which declared Bell its inventor. This webpage examines critical aspects of both the parliamentary motion and the congressional resolution.
The main users of the electrical telegraph were post offices, railway stations, the more important governmental centers (ministries), stock exchanges, very few nationally distributed newspapers, the largest internationally important corporations, and wealthy individuals.[14]
Telegraph exchanges worked mainly on a store and forward basis. Although telephones devices were in use before the invention of the telephone exchange, their success and economical operation would have been impossible with the schema and structure of the contemporary telegraph systems.
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