The Philadelphia Centennial opens. The day before, Thomas Alva Edison registers the last of his first five patents, all registered as “telegraphs,” although three are actually telephone patents. The Philadelphia Centennial highlights are June 25th, with Alexander Graham Bell’s demonstration of his telephone to a small audience. As the son of the creator of a teaching method for the deaf and himself a teacher of the deaf, Bell has a far more refined and sophisticated understanding of phonetics than Edison, who is not present at the presentation. Edison also has a serious hearing problem: he is completely deaf in his left ear and almost completely deaf in his right. He compulsively, almost fanatically, records every word, thought, and action he believes to have practical value. Like Beethoven, another deaf man addicted to constant notetaking, Edison feels lost without a pencil and is constantly stuffing notebooks and sticky notes into his pockets.
