The Telephone

During the 1870s, engineers were working to find a way to send multiple messages over one telegraph wire at the same time. Alexander Graham Bell was reading a book by Hermann Von Helmholtz, and got the idea to send sounds simultaneously over a wire instead, but Bell’s German was a little rusty, and the author had mentioned nothing about the transmission of sound via wire. He continued to pursue the solution, based on his false assumption, until he and his mechanic, Thomas Watson, built a device that could transmit sound over wires. The telephone was born in 1876, because Alexander Graham Bell didn't know it couldn't be done.