Charles Bourseul

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Charles Bourseul was born in Brussels, Belgium on the 28th of April 1829, and grew up in Douai, France. He is sometime credited with being an inventor of the telephone.

His father was a French army officer. Charles worked for the telegraph company as a civil engineer and mechanic. He made improvements to the telegraph system of L. F. Breguet (a French precision mechanic) and Samuel F. B. Morse (American, 1791-1872). Charles Bourseul experimented with electrical transmission of human voice and developed an electromagnetic microphone, but his telephone receiver failed to convert electrical current back into clear human voice sounds.

In 1854 Bourseul wrote a memorandum about transmitting human voice sounds by electrical currents that was first published in a magazine L'Illustration (Paris), though no prototype was realised. That is about the same time that Meucci created his first attempt at the telephone in Italy.

Bourseul explained: “Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disc which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.... It is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction; they are delicate and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favourable result.”

Bourseul died in Saint-Céré, France on the 23rd November 1912, at the age of 83.

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History of Telecommunications 1874-1930
(fr) Charles Bourseul, « Transmission électrique de la parole », L'Illustration, 26.08.1854.
(fr) G. Babin, « Le téléphone, invention française », L'Illustration, 21 novembre 1908.
(fr) R. Camboulives, « Un Occitan d'adoption : Charles Bourseul, inventeur du téléphone ». Communication faite à l'Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres de Toulouse dans sa séance du 8 novembre 1978.