The Telephone Gambit

The Telephone Gambit PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393062069
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Barcelona is a city that has been written and rewritten by its inhabitants for over 2000 years. The writer Joan Barril invites us to discover it in a pleasant and colourful stroll, through its human, artistic and architectural wealth. Includes fold-out panoramic views.

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039333368X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Telephone.

The Telephone Gambit

The Telephone Gambit PDF Author: Seth Shulman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393062069
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Barcelona is a city that has been written and rewritten by its inhabitants for over 2000 years. The writer Joan Barril invites us to discover it in a pleasant and colourful stroll, through its human, artistic and architectural wealth. Includes fold-out panoramic views.

The Moral Arc

The Moral Arc PDF Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0805096930
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author of The Believing Brains explores how science makes us better people. From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy. In The Moral Arc, Shermer explains how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism—scientific ways of thinking—have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world. “Michael Shermer is a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson “A memorable book, a book to recommend and discuss late into the night.” —Richard Dawkins “[A] brilliant contribution . . . Sherman’s is an exciting vision.” —Nature

The Tangled Web of Patent #174465

The Tangled Web of Patent #174465 PDF Author: Russell A. Pizer
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1438984049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Tangled Web Of Patent #174,465 is the story of fraud, collusion, perjury, corruption, bribery and what would now be called industrial espionage. It is a story that involves an individual who has been called one of America's inventive geniuses – Alexander Graham Bell. He has been held in the highest regard as the inventor of the telephone. However, careful scrutiny of numerous documents that include thousands of pages of sworn testimony before a Congressional investigations committee, show that Alexander Graham Bell was a party to what might be considered one of the most intriguing historical deceptions. With all due respect to Alexander Graham Bell, he was not the actual perpetrator of this historic fraud. The culprit in the initial historical subterfuge was Bell's father-in-law: Gardiner Greene Hubbard. The Tangled Web. . . will show how Alexander Graham Bell has been falsely given high honors in the history books of the United States depriving the true inventor of the telephone his rightful place. It will be seen that throughout the early years of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell gave different stories about events that surrounded the invention and issuance of a patent of what became – only via legal wranglings – the invention of the telephone. These different stories cast grave doubts about Alexander Graham Bell’s honesty and that of his father-in-law who reaped millions of dollars in profits through what became a telephone monopoly. This story clearly represents examples of two adages. "Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we practice to deceive" and "Truth is stranger than fiction."

A Troublesome Inheritance

A Troublesome Inheritance PDF Author: Nicholas Wade
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698163796
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

Exploding the Phone

Exploding the Phone PDF Author: Phil Lapsley
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
“A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computers, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary “harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI. The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a groundbreaking, captivating book that “does for the phone phreaks what Steven Levy’s Hackers did for computer pioneers” (Boing Boing). “An authoritative, jaunty and enjoyable account of their sometimes comical, sometimes impressive and sometimes disquieting misdeeds.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brilliantly researched.” —The Atlantic “A fantastically fun romp through the world of early phone hackers, who sought free long distance, and in the end helped launch the computer era.” —The Seattle Times

The Invention of Miracles

The Invention of Miracles PDF Author: Katie Booth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501167111
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"An astonishingly revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell, telling the true-and troubling-story of the inventor of the telephone. We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that's not how he saw his own career. Bell was an elocution teacher by profession. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach the deaf to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. And yet by the end of his life, despite his best efforts-or perhaps, more accurately, because of them-Bell had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy. The Invention of Miracles recounts an extraordinary piece of forgotten history. Weaving together a moving love story with a fascinating tale of innovation, it follows the complicated tragedy of a brilliant young man who set about stamping out what he saw as a dangerous language: Sign. The book offers a heartbreaking look at how heroes can become villains and how good intentions are, unfortunately, nowhere near enough-as well as a powerful account of the dawn of a civil rights movement and the triumphant tale of how the Deaf community reclaimed their once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has been researching this story for over a decade, poring over Bell's papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she's also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell's legacy on her family would set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone"--

Invented by Law

Invented by Law PDF Author: Christopher Beauchamp
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Christopher Beauchamp debunks the myth of Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers during fiercely contested battles for patent monopoly. The courts anointed Bell father of the telephone—likely the most consequential intellectual property right ever granted.

Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History

Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History PDF Author: Kathleen W. Craver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313348111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Major help for those inevitable American History term paper projects has arrived to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school age to undergraduate will be able to get a jumpstart on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here in an easy-to-use format. Users can quickly choose from the 100 important events of the nineteenth century, carefully selected to be appealing to students, and delve right in. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as iPod and iMovie. The best in primary and secondary sources for further research are then annotated, followed by vetted, stable Web site suggestions and multimedia resources for further viewing and listening. Librarians and faculty will want to use this as well. Students dread term papers, but with this book, the research experience is transformed and elevated. Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History is a superb source to motivate and educate students who have a wide range of interests and talents. The provided topics on events, people, inventions, cultural contributions, wars, and technological advances reflect the country's nineteenth-century character and experience. Some examples of the topics are Barbary Pirate Wars, the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings liaison, Tecumseh and the Prophet, the Santa Fe Trail, Immigration in the 1840s, the Seneca Falls Convention, the Purchase of Alaska, Boss Tweed's Ring, Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and Scott Joplin and Ragtime Music.

Patently Contestable

Patently Contestable PDF Author: Stathis Arapostathis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262313421
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
An examination of the fierce disputes that arose in Britain in the decades around 1900 concerning patents for electrical power and telecommunications. Late nineteenth-century Britain saw an extraordinary surge in patent disputes over the new technologies of electrical power, lighting, telephony, and radio. These battles played out in the twin tribunals of the courtroom and the press. In Patently Contestable, Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday examine how Britain's patent laws and associated cultures changed from the 1870s to the 1920s. They consider how patent rights came to be so widely disputed and how the identification of apparently solo heroic inventors was the contingent outcome of patent litigation. Furthermore, they point out potential parallels between the British experience of allegedly patentee-friendly legislation introduced in 1883 and a similar potentially empowering shift in American patent policy in 2011. After explaining the trajectory of an invention from laboratory to Patent Office to the court and the key role of patent agents, Arapostathis and Gooday offer four case studies of patent-centered disputes in Britain. These include the mostly unsuccessful claims against the UK alliance of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison in telephony; publicly disputed patents for technologies for the generation and distribution of electric power; challenges to Marconi's patenting of wireless telegraphy as an appropriation of public knowledge; and the emergence of patent pools to control the market in incandescent light bulbs.