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Telephone   /tˈɛləfˌoʊn/   Listen
noun
Telephone  n.  (Physics) An instrument for reproducing sounds, especially articulate speech, at a distance. Note: The ordinary telephone consists essentially of a device by which currents of electricity, produced by sounds through the agency of certain mechanical devices and exactly corresponding in duration and intensity to the vibrations of the air which attend them, are transmitted to a distant station, and there, acting on suitable mechanism, reproduce similar sounds by repeating the vibrations. The necessary variations in the electrical currents are usually produced by means of a microphone attached to a thin diaphragm upon which the voice acts, and are intensified by means of an induction coil. In the magnetic telephone, or magneto-telephone, the diaphragm is of soft iron placed close to the pole of a magnet upon which is wound a coil of fine wire, and its vibrations produce corresponding vibrable currents in the wire by induction. The mechanical, or string, telephone is a device in which the voice or sound causes vibrations in a thin diaphragm, which are directly transmitted along a wire or string connecting it to a similar diaphragm at the remote station, thus reproducing the sound. It does not employ electricity.



verb
Telephone  v. t.  To convey or announce by telephone.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Telephone" Quotes from Famous Books



... the miasma of the back-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers—a form of literature that is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given to Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears to the telephone, and we forget that the great causes which are always at work, and which will shape the issues of this war, are not recorded upon the telephone. There are things truer and more important than the latest dispatches. ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... for the play that night and I foresaw difficulties at the public telephone, and George's first remark of "Hullo, hullo, is that Signals? Put me through to His Majesty's," confirmed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various

... will be, not to write at all. The telegraph, at the end of the century, costs but a halfpenny a word, and we seem to be within measurable distance of the universal adoption of the telephone. Under these circumstances, it is easy to take heed of the warning contained in that classical puzzle of our childhood, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various

... waiting for him eighteen months in a genial government office to barricade himself in an old shelter on Seal Island. It was hard to know what to make of it. He had brought impressive stores of food with him, books, sound and vision tapes but not telephone or television. For the next three years he had had no contact ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon

... them, all looking with delighted eyes at the walls, the benches, the telephone, all the modest objects in this waiting-room, objects which are so much more attractive under the light of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel


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