The Next Web, 21 August 2014
Sir Alexander Graham Bell may be better known as the guy who invented the first ‘practical’ telephone, but the Scottish scientist laid claim to an arsenal of additional innovations.
Among these were the photophone, a wireless telephone of sorts that enabled sounds (including speech) to be transmitted via light. It’s said that Bell actually valued the photophone more than the telephone from his lifetime achievements, even though it never quite took off and is now consigned to the footnotes of history.
However, more than 130 years after the photophone first came to light, Professor Harald Haas is pioneering his own light-centric wireless communications technology. And ironically, he’s doing so from the Alexander Graham Bell building at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.