Robert Hooke

I blame Robert Hooke‘s 1667 invention of a string telephone for Twitter and other social media.

A scientist who made pivotal discoveries in the latter half of the 1600s, Hooke also invented a string telephone in 1667 that used wire to send mechanical vibrations over long distances. Hooke was well known, as were his experiments and discoveries. That string phone experiment might well have been the catalyst that stimulated the imaginations of the various scientists and inventors who created the world’s first electrically powered telephones in the 1860s and 1870s.

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