There are those who believe that the inventions we see in the world around us today were inevitable--even if Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison had chosen different careers, we would still be using telephones and electric lighting systems like the ones we use today[1]. To determine whether that is true or not, we are going to put you in the position of a 19th-century competitor with Bell and his rival telegraph inventor Elisha Gray, and see whether you can come up with an alternate communications design that could have changed history if it had been implemented at that time.
In this case, you and a group of other students will attempt to design and build a system that improves on Alexander Graham Bell's famous telephone patent and a caveat submitted on the same day by Elisha Gray. (Copies of these materials appear at the end of this packet of materials.) You will be assuming the role of a 19th-century inventor like Edison who used a research team to compete with these two. Even though Bell has a patent for a system, your team can patent improvements so significant that others will be able to use them without infringing on the Bell patent.
In particular, we want you and your team to focus on improvements that will make the telephone as energy-efficient as possible, focusing especially on reducing its dependence on forms of energy that have the potential to increase pollution. For this purpose, we will allow you to experiment with technologies not available in the 19th century--for example, you can consider the use of solar cells as a power source. (See Exhibit 4 for more details on objectives, equipment and rules).
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This page was last edited: Sunday, July 18, 1999