Limitations of Magneto Transmitter. For reasons not finally established, the ability of the magneto telephone to produce large currents from large sounds is not equal to its ability to produce large sounds from large currents. As a receiving device, it is unexcelled, and but slight improvement has been made since its first invention. It is inadequate as a transmitter, and as early as 1876, Professor Bell exhibited other means than electromagnetic action for producing the varying currents as a consequence of diaphragm motion. Much other inventive effort was addressed to this problem, the aim of all being to send out more robust voice currents.

Fig. 6. Telegraph Equipment Converted into Telephone Equipment
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Other Methods of Producing Voice Currents. Some of these means are the variation of resistance in the path of direct current, variation in the pressure of the source of that current, and variation in the electrostatic capacity of some part of the circuit.

Electrostatic Telephone. The latter method is principally that of Dolbear and Edison. Dolbear's thought is illustrated in Fig. 7. Two conducting plates are brought close together. One is free to vibrate as a diaphragm, while the other is fixed. The element 1 in Fig. 7 is merely a stud to hold rigid the plate it bears against. Each of two instruments connected by a line contains such a pair of plates, and a battery in the line keeps them charged to its potential. The two diaphragms of each instrument are kept drawn towards each other because their unlike charges attract each other. The vibration of one of the diaphragms changes the potential of the other pair; the degree of attraction thus is varied, so that vibration of the diaphragm and sound waves result.

Examples of this method of telephone transmission are more familiar to later practice in the form of condenser receivers. A condenser, in usual present practice, being a pair of closely adjacent conductors of considerable surface insulated from each other, a rapidly varying current actually may move one or both of the conductors. Ordinarily these are of thin sheet metal (foil) interleaved with an insulating material, such as paper or mica. Voice currents can vibrate the metal sheets in a degree to cause the condenser to speak. These condenser methods of telephony have not become commercial.

Fig. 7. Electrostatic Telephone
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