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| | Mike Gorman: Bell's Path the the Telephone--Home Page |
 | | Bell knew, from Helmholtz, that this wave would "express in a graphical manner the vibratory movement of the air while the reeds were producing their musical tones."[20] Furthermore, the vibrations of the individual reeds on the permanent magnet could be summed into a single undulating curve. |
 | | Bell knew he could never build such a device, owing in part to the multiplicity of reeds that would be required, but it served as a new mental model, showing him how the undulating waves traced by the phonautograph could be turned into an undulating electric current and reproduced as sound. |
 | | Bell felt that the the first "telephone", developed by Philip Reis, in Germany, worked on this make-or-break principle; as a result, it could reproduce the pitch of a vowel, but not the complex overtones represented by the multiple resonators in the Helmholtz apparatus. |
| www3.iath.virginia.edu /albell/introduction.html (7301 words) |
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