Been super quite round here. Don't have any part 15 news at the moment so here's a cool story on another communications industry: An interesting bit of telephone history that kind of surprised me , Essentially the article points out the fact that Alexander Gram Bell didn't actually invent the telephone at all, that's not what his patent was for - despite the fact his lawyers managed to still prove his invention was a telephone, even though they "don't understand this at all." - (speaking of Bell's invention).
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Telephone's Rise Was Shaped by Courts and Lobbying, Not Just Wires, Historians Say
The patent Bell filed in 1876 never described a speaking telephone. His lawyers later argued it did. ....
https://broadbandbreakfast.com/telephones-rise-was-shaped-by-courts-and-lobbying-not-just-wires-historians-say/
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON, June 22, 2026 — Three communications historians examined the first 50 years of the American telephone industry, from Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent through 1926, .... A patent that predated the invention. A single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court did more to make Bell the telephone's sole recognized inventor than his own patent did, .... .. Bell's 1876 patent never mentioned transmitting speech, and he had not yet transmitted an intelligible word when he received it, Beauchamp said. A teacher of the deaf with expertise in sound rather than electrical engineering, Bell had set out to build a "harmonic telegraph," a high-capacity system designed to send multiple signals over a single wire, not a device for transmitting voice. ....
The broad legal theory that ultimately defined Bell's patent rights came from his lawyers, not from Bell himself, Beauchamp said. The night before his first major patent trial, Bell wrote to his wife complaining that his own lawyers "don't understand this at all." The lawyers’ argument won anyway, fighting off hundreds of competing claims through the 1880s from rivals ...
Internal AT&T correspondence from the 1890s and 1900s shows a minority of company executives, dismissed internally as "ridiculous dreamers," believed telephone service could be profitably sold to farmers, working-class households, and women for social conversation, Fischer said....