Famous words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875 as he tested the first telephone.
Watson made everything in Bell’s lab. Bell found him in an electrical workshop in Massachusetts. He was a handy young man, but uneducated. After his famous invention, Bell went to England and lost interest, but Watson was at the center of myriad inventions of the young telephone industry. (Starting with, “how do I let somebody know they have a phone call?”)
The following is from Exploring Life by Thomas A. Watson, 1926. A friend of mine sent me the above text as well as the quote, below. I had to laugh when I read it because it reminds me so much of what I read today about religious conservatives and their reactions to evolutionary theory.
- I shall not describe and comment on all we saw and learned in Egypt. It would merely repeat what has been often told before. . . .
- I had been interested in comparing the desert sands with the beach sand I had often studied under the microscope at home. The grains of beach sand are usually angular for, although they may have been churned against each other by the waves for many years since they were set free from the parent ledges; yet, as each grain is protected by a thin film of water that acts as a cushion, its corners are not worn off. But, as the wind-blown sand has no film of water on its grains to protect them from erosion, their clashing when they are rolled by the wind knocks off their corners and they soon become spherical or egg-shaped.
- This fact was probably well known to geologists, but I discovered it for myself in Egypt at this time. I carried my discovery a step further by examining the grains of sand in the sandstones of the region to see if I could determine whether they had been windblown in a desert or wave-washed on a beach before they were consolidated into the hard rock. To my delight, I found the grains in some of the sandstones were angular and in others, smoothly rounded. And I noticed that the latter kind of stones were often intricately crossbedded, which is also a characteristic of wind-blown sand. It was evident that some of the sandstones were of beach origin and that others had been formed under desert conditions.
- With the enthusiasm of a discoverer, I was explaining this to a group of men and women who had gone with me to study the geology of the region about Thebes. An old Scotchman, who had joined our party, suddenly broke in with a dissertation on the wickedness of a man pretending to know more than the Bible. “When God created sand,” he said, “he created it just as he wanted it. If he wanted it coarse or fine, round or sharp, He made it so, for He knew man would need all kinds of sand.” . . .
- I and the other students of Egyptian rocks went on to the next point of interest, leaving the man declaiming to a crowd of natives who did not understand a word. A native policeman, attracted by the man’s loud talk, came up to see if a riot was underway.
- Research and text by LA – thx