Killed by the Supernatural on This Day in History

This day in history: John Bell became the first person in history to pass away of supernatural causes on this day in 1820.

John Bell Sr was an American farmer who is a central figure in the Bell Witch ghost story of southern American folklore. In 1817, Bell contracted a mysterious affliction that worsened over the next three years, ultimately leading to his death. According to the story, the Bell Witch took pleasure in tormenting him during his affliction, finally poisoning him one December morning as he lay unconscious after suffering a number of violent seizures.

Bell became a successful farmer and gained prominence in his area of East Tennessee. It is said that sometime late in 1816, John and his daughter Betsy Bell began to be plagued by a goblin-like entity that came to be known as either the Bell Witch or Kate Batts Witch (after Kate Batts, a neighbour of the Bell family). The Bell Witch apparently appeared to John one day when he was inspecting his fields. It took the form of an animal, but ran off before he could shoot it. The entity then began attacking family members and even visitors to the house, and began haunting the community. The witch became known far and wide, and even Andrew Jackson visited the Bell household in 1819 to experience the Witch at first hand.

Bell's subsequent affliction was most likely a neurological disorder. Very little was known about such disorders in the early nineteenth century, and few treatment options were available, although the Scottish anatomist Sir Charles Bell discovered a neurological disorder that yielded symptoms almost identical to those displayed by John Bell at the onset of his affliction.

John Bell died on December 19, 1820, at the age of 70. After his death, the witch was no longer reported as attacking Bell's family. The Bell Witch is said to have disrupted the funeral service, singing bawdy drinking songs. The Bell Witch was said to have said she "fixed him," and "i did it," and "he will not get up," after the murder occurred.

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Alexander Graham Bell's Telephone on This Day in History

 

The first successful test of a telephone was made by Alexander Graham Bell on this day in 1876. 

The concept of the telephone dates back to the string telephone or lover's telephone that has been known for centuries, comprising two diaphragms connected by a taut string or wire. Sound waves are carried as mechanical vibrations along the string or wire from one diaphragm to the other. The classic example is the tin can telephone, a children's toy made by connecting the two ends of a string to the bottoms of two metal cans, paper cups or similar items. The essential idea of this toy was that a diaphragm can collect voice sounds from the voice sounds for reproduction at a distance. One precursor to the development of the electromagnetic telephone originated in 1833 when Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber invented an electromagnetic device for the transmission of telegraphic signals at the University of Göttingen, in Lower Saxony, helping to create the fundamental basis for the technology that was later used in similar telecommunication devices. Gauss's and Weber's invention is purported to be the world's first electromagnetic telegraph.

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The Ubiquitous Telephone on This Day in History

This day in history: The first push-button telephone went into service on this day in 1963. 

Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed. As with other influential inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the computer, several inventors pioneered experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other's ideas. New controversies over the issue still arise from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the invention of the telephone.

Phones have certainly changed over the decades. There are 100,000 pay phones left in America, but you would be hard-pressed to find one. They were certainly useful in The Matrix, Get Smart and Superman, and let's not forget the Colin Farrell 2002 thriller "Phone Booth." New York City, which once had 30,000 payphones, removed its last public payphone in 2022.

Another great movie was "Cellular" with Kim Basinger and Jason Statham which is now dated because it was released shortly before the advent of the Smartphone. There are also still people using rotary dial phones, though they stopped making them long ago. 

In 2002, only 10% of the world's population used mobile phones and by 2005 that percentage had risen to 46%. By the end of 2009, there were a total of nearly 6 billion mobile and fixed-line telephone subscribers worldwide. This included 1.26 billion fixed-line subscribers and 4.6 billion mobile subscribers.

Today, the number of people that own a smart and feature phone is 7.26 Billion, making up 91.00% of the world's population.

There is a Telephone Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. Perhaps they have the red phone used in the 1960s Batman show.

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