Bell, Berners-Lee, and the Promise of New Technology

More than a century ago, Alexander Graham Bell recorded his voice on a waxed cardboard disc at a laboratory in Washington DC. This week, we got to hear this scratchy recording—and Bell’s voice—for the first time. Much of the recording involves Bell counting. He counts all the way up to 50, carefully enunciating each numeral. […]

Review of an Old Book Unjustly Forgotten

Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]