Speech transmitted by telephone on March 10, 1876

Speech transmitted by telephone: On this day, the first discernible speech is transmitted over a telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his assistant in another room by saying, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days before.

Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a leading authority in public speaking and speech correction. The young Bell was trained to take over the family business, and while still a teenager he became a voice teacher and began to experiment in sound. In 1870, his family moved to Ontario, Canada, and in 1871 Bell went to Boston to demonstrate his father's method of teaching speech to the deaf. The next year, he opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.

In his free time, Bell experimented with sound waves and became convinced that it would be possible to transmit speech over a telegraph-like system. He enlisted the aid of a gifted mechanic Thomas Watson, and together the two spent countless nights trying to convert Bell's ideas into practical form. In 1875, while working on his multiple harmonic telegraph, Bell developed the basic ideas for the telephone. He designed a device to transmit speech vibrations electrically between two receivers and in June 1875 tested his invention. No intelligible words were transmitted, but sounds resembling human speech were heard at the receiving end.

On February 14, 1876, he filed a U.S. patent application for his telephone. Just a few hours later, another American inventor, Elisha Gray, filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office about his intent to seek a similar patent on a telephone transmitter and receiver. Bell filed first, so on March 7 he was awarded U.S. patent 174,465, which granted him ownership over both his telephone instruments and the concept of a telephone system.

Three days later, on March 10, Bell successfully tested his telephone for the first time in his Boston home. In May, he publicly demonstrated the invention before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, and in June at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In October, he successfully tested his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport.

In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company with two investors, and the first commercial applications of the telephone took place. Within a few months, the first of hundreds of legal challenges to Bell's telephone patent began. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld Bell's claims, and the Bell Telephone Company enjoyed a monopoly on the telephone until the expiration of the patent in 1894. After 1878, however, the legal battles were out of Alexander Graham Bell's hands because he sold his company to a group of financiers. The company, which after 1899 was led by the parent American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), eventually grew into the largest corporation in the world.

Alexander Graham Bell continued his experiments in communication, inventing the photophone, which transmitted speech by light rays, and the graphophone, which recorded sound. He continued to work with the deaf, including the educator Helen Keller, and used the royalties from his inventions to finance several organizations dedicated to the oral education of the deaf. He later served as president of the National Geographic Society. Beginning in 1895, he experimented with the possibility of flight and built giant man-carrying kites and a hydrofoil craft. He died in 1922 at his summer home and laboratory on Cape Breton Island, Canada.

History Channel / Wikipedia / PBS / Encyclopaedia Britannica / Encyclopaedia Britannica / Smithsonian / Library of Congress.gov / National Archives.gov

Wikipedia.org  Photo: Alexander Graham Bell, credit Fine Art Print - Granger. Alexander Graham Bell, in his search for lightweight structures for flight, discovered the octahedron-tetrahedron complex (the octet truss) in 1903, and used it for constructions such as kites, a windbreak and an observation tower. Alexander Graham Bell, kite

Understanding Military Terminology - go/no-go

(DOD) Go / No-go:

A critical point at which a decision to proceed or not must be made. Wikipedia / Joint Publication 3-02

The Old Salt’s Corner

Flight Deck Jersey Colors

While watching flight operations on the carrier you will notice several different types of crew supporting the aircraft on deck. These crews each wear a different color jersey to identify their function.

Jersey Colors

RED: Ordnancemen, repair parties and fire fighters.

BLUE: Aircraft handling, chockman, and elevator operators.

GREEN: Aircraft maintenance men.

YELLOW: Aircraft movement directors and catapult officers.

BROWN: Plane captains.

PURPLE: Fuelers who refuel aircraft between missions.

WHITE: Other (medical team, air wing LSOs, sighting teams, safety personnel, and visitors).

“I’m Just Sayin’”

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

“Thought for the Day”

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.”

~ Helen Keller

“What I Have Learned”

“Success is not forever, and failure isn't fatal.”

~ Don Shula

Bizarre News (we couldn’t make up stuff this good – real news story)

Police: Traffic Stop Leads To Kidnapping Charge For New Jersey Man

Luis Moreno Jr., 26, was pursued by police in Fort Lee, N.J., after he entered the carpool lane approaching the George Washington Bridge in January because he appeared to be alone in his SUV.

After ignoring several signals to pull over, he finally stopped and, when informed of his offense, told the officer, “I have two passengers in the back” and rolled down a window to show them (in the vehicle’s third row), apparently satisfying the officer.

However, as Moreno pulled away, one passenger began screaming and banging on the back door. Moreno sped off with his hostages but was subsequently stopped again and charged with kidnaping and criminal restraint (but no HOV violation!). New York Daily News

Mr. Answer Man Please Tell Us: There are vitamins called A, B, C, D, E, and K. But what happened to vitamins F, G, H, I, and J?

Most of those missing vitamins between E and K exist, but for one reason or another - mostly scientific disorganization — are now more often called by different names.

Our first five vitamins, A, B, C, D, and E, got their sequential names when they were discovered, one after the other, during the early-20th-century search for cures to then-common diseases. Many of these arose from limited intake of produce and other fresh food, which used to be much tougher to come by: scurvy was a vitamin-C deficiency that made sailors’ gums bleed; beriberi was caused by lack of vitamin B (later B1), found in whole grains, meat, and legumes. The general gloominess of English weather was responsible for rampant rickets, due to insufficient vitamin D.

After these breakthroughs, the great vitamin hunt was on, with most of the alphabet put to use at some point naming the results. Originally the assumption was that each new discovery would get the next available letter, but the system went to crap when (1) many of the post-E vitamins were later re-identified as vitamins in the B complex, bearing designations between B2 and B12 (please don’t ask what happened to 4, 8, 10, and 11), and (2) the Germans rebelled and decided to assign letters based on medical relevance rather than order of discovery. Here’s a breakdown:

Vitamin F: Known today as the essential fatty acids, of the omega-3 and omega-6 varieties. Should we seek these out? Possibly: they might decrease your risk of cardiovascular disease, but (warns the Mayo Clinic) they also might make you bleed and/or smell like fish.

Vitamin G: The American name for what the Brits called B2. Eventually a truce was declared, and now we call it riboflavin.

Vitamins H and I: H is one that got named under the German scheme — it stands for Haut, German for ”skin”, because that’s what it was thought to strengthen. It’s now called B7 or biotin. (Something similar happened with vitamin K, named for Koagulation.) Vitamin I was said to have a role in digestion, and has since been identified with various members of the B group.

Finally, vitamin J: Beneficial to guinea pigs but unneeded by people, it didn’t make the cut.

The second half of the alphabet gets even messier: the bulk of the later would-be vitamins proved not to figure significantly in human growth and consequently were stripped of their status.

For starters, there was vitamin L, so named for its apparent role in rat lactation. Better known as anthranilic acid, L1 is now closely regulated by the DEA: as one of the primary compounds used in the synthesis of the powerful recreational sedative methaqualone, aka Quaaludes, it falls into that intriguing category of substances that are fun but potentially fatal.

Vitamin M is now called folic acid or B9; vitamin P was a name given to the compounds called flavonoids, which apparently contribute more to plant pigmentation than human well-being; and Q is an antioxidant called coenzyme Q or Q10. Vitamin N may have been thioctic acid, said to have helped with “burning mouth syndrome”.

Vitamin O goes all but unmentioned in the literature; the vitamin R story is nearly as murky. Vitamins S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z either turned out to be inessential to human health (S promotes growth in chicks, T heals wounds in insects) and thus failed to clear the vitamin threshold, or they never existed.

The lesson in all this? Stop worrying about vitamins. Daily multivitamins in particular are a first-world solution to a third-world problem — the average American consumes plenty of the recommended daily amounts naturally without assistance in pill form. Much of the food in the developed world is injected with vitamins before it even reaches our plates. Certain vitamins, like A, can even be toxic if you get too much. A U.S. Preventative Services Task Force reviewing 27 studies covering almost half a million people found no evidence that vitamin supplements offer a benefit for heart disease, or delay death from any cause.

Gizmodo

Research:  Science Clarified • Wikipedia • San Francisco Chronicle • Nobel Prize.org

Where Did That Saying Come From?

“Catch 22:” is the title of a novel published in 1961, written by Joseph Heller and based on his experiences as a World War II bomber pilot in Europe.

The central character in ”Catch 22” is the pilot Yossarian, whose all-too-accurate perception of the futility and insanity of war leads him to seek a psychiatric exemption from flying further combat missions. But Yossarian runs smack into what Heller dubbed “Catch 22” (“catch” in this sense meaning “snag”). As Heller put it, “There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22…. If he flew them [more missions] he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”

In inventing “Catch 22”, Joseph Heller had really only given a name to a particularly modern sort of bureaucratic conundrum, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a set of circumstances in which one requirement, etc., is dependent upon another, which is in turn dependent upon the first.” Wikipedia

NAVSPEAK aka U.S. Navy Slang

Booter: A Sailor that has just reported to his first duty assignment after completing Recruit Training.

FAG: Fighter Attack Guy - an F/A-18 Hornet/Super Hornet pilot or naval flight officer (“NFO”). Also a “Fine Academy Graduate” used as a derogatory term to refer to graduates of the Naval Academy. Also “Forward Area Guy” used as derogatory term for submarine personnel other than engineering department, brought upon due to a COB's ban of the term “Coner”.

Queer: Derogatory term used by sailors when referring to U.S. Air Force personnel. Nickname for the EA6B Prowler usually used by personnel in the aviation community, it is derived from the shape of the refueling probe on the nose of the aircraft resembling a “broken wrist” and the “Q” at the ending of the VAQ designation of the Prowler squadrons.

Sand Crab: A civilian in Civil Service positions working for the U.S. Navy. Very derogatory.

Just for you MARINE

Delayed Enlistment Program: A recruiting procedure which allows a person to enlist in the inactive reserve prior to being ordered to active duty. It legally binds the person to enlistment and gives him or her seniority when ordered to active duty.

DELTA: (Commtalk) D.

Delta Delta: Dependent Daughter.

Delta Hotel: Dependent Husband.

Delta Sierra: Dumb Shit. Also Dependent Son.

Delta Whiskey: Dependent Wife. From the radio phonetics used by Military Police for the abbreviation DW.

Naval Aviation Squadron Nicknames

VFA-37 - Strike Fighter Squadron 37: “Ragin’ Bulls”
NAS Oceana, Virginia

The Strange, Mysterious or Downright Weird

Medical Mysteries: Chinese Baby Born “Pregnant” With Twins In Abdomen Due To Fetus-In-Fetu Condition

A team of doctors in Hong Kong have revealed news about a new study done on a baby girl that was born back in 2010 with what they believed to be two tumors growing in her abdomen. The study ended up revealing that the baby was born with a rare condition known as “fetus-in-fetu”, which caused her to be born “pregnant” with twins.

What the doctors has assumed to be tumors actually turned out to be two fetuses which were developed to about the stage of 8 to 10 weeks. They had arms, legs, a defined spine, rib cage, intestines, “primitive” brain matter and even an umbilical cord.

Obviously, the medical journal states that it would have been impossible for the baby to conceive on her own, so of course the fetuses were fertilized by the parents and it just went to the wrong place.

Apparently, “fetus-in-fetu” happens once in about every half million births, however it has only been reported about 200 times worldwide. The baby that was born with this condition in Hong Kong has recovered without any additional complications and will live a normal life despite the abnormal birth condition. Medical Daily