Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Photophone -- May 11, 2010



Doctor Peter Henri Van Der Weyde was born in Nymegen, Holland in 1813. He went on to live a remarkable life of achievement in the sciences and the arts. He died in America in 1895.

This item, from the Sunday, 16-January-1881 New York Sun, describes a lecture he was going to give that night on the Photophone. I assume that this was Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter's 1880 invention, which used a beam of light for wireless sound transmission. When I was a kid, I saw a woodcut of the Photophone in an old National Geographic article on Doctor Bell and was fascinated.

The image comes from the first installment, in the February, 1893 issue of Manufacturer and Builder.





from NOTES OF ENTERTAINMENTS



Lecture by P H Vanderweyde on "Photophones" before the Polytechinic Association Cooper Union Thursday evening.

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