A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DCharles Bourseul : 1829 - 1912
Sometimes several inventors have the same idea at the same time, but only the one whose invention is successful in practice stays in our minds. All inventions need the so-called "original idea". Charles Bourseul's "original idea" stands at the beginning of the road to the telephone. Charles Bourseul was born in Brussels on 28th of April 1829. A few years after he was born, his family left Brussels and moved to France, because his father served in the French army as an officer. In contrast to his father, Charles Bourseul went to a telegraph office as a civil engineer. After he got a job as a mechanic, he started improving L. F. Breguet's (French precision mechanic) and S. F. B. Morse's (American painter and technical engineer, 1791 - 1872) telegraphy system. The successful results encouraged him to experiment with the electrical transmission of human voice. His construction was similar to the future microphone, but the construction of a receiving part to convert the electrical current back into a human voice again failed. His experiments did not give him as much success as he hoped. The fundamental idea of the electrical transmitting of sound was published by Charles Bourseul first in 1854 in the magazine "L'Illustration de Paris". In 1878 after Philip Reis (German physicist and technical engineer, 1834 - 1874) and Alexander Graham Bell (American technical engineer, 1847 - 1922) had already published their telephone system Bourseul got an official acknowledgment for his "original idea". After a busy life spent improving the French telegraphy system he died in Saint-Cere / Lothringen on the 23rd November 1912. Petar Lesic and Dirk R. Gierhake, Telekom Unterrichtsblaetter
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