It is old news, but if you are getting this post on your phone,today there is someone well worth tipping your flat clap to.  Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci (April 13, 1808 – October 18, 1889).  He is  best known for developing a ‘voice communication apparatus’ which several sources credit as the first telephone including US congress, who acknowledged this fact on this day, June 11th 20o2.

Meucci set up a form of ‘voice communication’ link in his Staten Island  home that connected its second floor bedroom to his laboratory He submitted a ‘patent caveat’ for his telephone-like device in 1871, which he did not renew after 1874. Woops!  2 years later, someone else did. Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) , eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who  for a long time was  credited with inventing the first practical telephone.

Bell’s father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on  elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell’s life’s work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually ended up  in Bell being awarded the first  US patent for the telephone in 1876. Later, Bell considered his most famous ‘invention’ an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study . Its funny because the two men look like they were separated at birth, unless they are the same person and google has let me down.

I wonder if Alex or Ant would ever ever in their wildest dreams imagined the telephone scenario that has taken over our world. How most of us  cannot seem to go anywhere without our phones. How people spend so much of their time, not listening to their phones but watching them. Inane loud conversation seem to have taken over most of our public places, and why do they always seem so one sided? I often wonder if people who have loud intrusive conversations on the train and the bus have elective mutes as friends on the other side. But the comment I have is ‘when did everyone stop listening? People walk (and drive)  around staring at ‘vital information’ on their phone screens , assuming other people will get out of the way, and everyone is looking and not listening at all..

SONG OF THE DAY -Anita Ward, Ring my Bell

So many telephone songs to chose from, We could have had the marvellous Gaga               ( telephone 2010) , or the rocking Blondie, ( hanging on the telephone 1978) but I feel to go with the ‘Ring my Bell’ as it has the most annoying little  syn-drum in it and is just catchy enough to crawl under your skin…it has nothing to do with telephones at all. I am not sure what she is using as an analogy for her bell, butI  shall move swiftly on… You will pleased to hear this is the 12″- 8 min long version. But Anita seems to have left the studio after about 3 mins, never to return and the backing vocalist valiantly soldier on for the next 5 minutes without her! …ha ha ha …so get your disco dancing shoes on, there is a particularly wierd little drum thingy going on  at about 7 mins. Anita Ward brought this out in 1979 just as disco was on the wane, so was labelled a ‘one hit wonder’ but ironically has just had a new single out on itunes about 2 weeks ago called ‘it’s my night’ which will still have you boogying round the kitchen. She did also record that marvellous ‘I love the nightlife, I got to boogie, on the disco round oh yeh” OH YEH!