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257:(two way) communication was another favorite subject, born out of Edison's desire to "speed up" telegraphic conversations by sending and receiving at the same time. Whether Edison could actually perform this telegraphic feat has never documented, but Sweigert credited this story with his inspiration for a full duplex cordless telephone. Sweigert studied how duplexes reduced frustrations dealing with technologies, going back to the early days of telegraphy.
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to vary the induced resistance from varying frequency in the voice. He frequently cited Bell besting Edison on the invention of the telephone as Edison's motivation to invent the phonograph. He expressed dismay how Bell missed inventing the phonograph after his frequent lectures about visualizing
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Sweigert predicted that half of the people in the world would own a wireless phone in the time of his children. With the world population of wireless phones at 3.2 billion in 2008, he was probably not far wrong with this prediction. He predicted integrated cameras, GPS, accelerometers, and other
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and its potential uses to reduce the size of electronic products. He was friends with many of the people involved in the founding of Bowmar
Instrument Corporation in Fort Wayne, the makers of the first electronic pocket calculator, or more popularly known as the Bowmar Brain.
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reported the patent in the June 14th, 1969 edition. (page 52, column 6) In the article, Sweigert gives the first description of how the "remote phone" might be used as a remote office or around the home, foreshadowing the way cell phones are used today.
333:" traveling through the air and then the wire, linking the words together to reproduce a conversation. He envisioned a home where all kinds of devices generated "message wavelets" to share the electromagnetic spectrum, foreshadowing
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He also enjoyed the fact that Bell was a complete amateur compared with professional established laboratories of Elisha Gray and super-inventor Thomas Edison. He greatly admired Edison's work on improving the vibrating
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in the initial invention. Sweigert was physically disabled, and saw the cordless phone as a similar to the telephone in terms of motivation and inspiration for the development of the invention. Sweigert sided with
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Sweigert studied the life stories of these inventors, and he frequently would recount the early technical and legal struggles of these inventors to get their inventions patented and protected.
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With the patent application submitted on May 2, 1966 to the US Patent and
Trademark Office, Sweigert submitted a working model of the phone in addition to the required description. A
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356:. His persistent frustration after the invention of the cordless phone was his inability to do the advanced calculus required by the equations for advanced antenna design.
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in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1938. While reading about
Farnsworth and his later work on submarine detection equipment, he was led to a research and development position with
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Sweigert credited his military experience for invention of the cordless telephone, citing experimentation with various antennas, signal frequencies, and types of radios.
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article, published shortly after the patent was filed, documented the first public demonstration of the cordless phone with a picture of the device and the inventor.
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audio waves and electrically reproducing them. Sweigert credited being able to visualize human voice waveforms as another key in perfecting the cordless phone.
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reported that
Sweigert used a part from his washing machine for the invention - the solenoid used to lift the phone's receiver when a current was sensed in the
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to filter out noise and amplify the original signal is used in the cordless phone. He also admired
Armstrong's courage to challenge the status quo of
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advanced sensors in the 1969 Moon lander would be integrated into the wireless phone. Sweigert received notice of his patent approval on day of the
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licenses: W8ZIS (Ohio) and N9LC (Indiana). He held the amateur radio extra class license, the highest class license. He also held a
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field radios were key to the US Army for the entire
Vietnam War. Sweigert was fascinated by the development of the
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Sweigert greatly admired Philo
Farnsworth for his invention of television, and more specifically his work with the
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337:. Sweigert's philosophy was "the simpler, the better, as could be understood by a child". He often recounted
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was another
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for the cordless phone was similar, imagining the human voice waveform for a word as a short "
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DUPLEX RADIO COMMUNICATION AND SIGNALING APPARATUS FOR PORTABLE TELEPHONE ... G. H. SWEIGERT
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Sweigert taught electronics at the vocational college level in his later years for
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Corporation in 1969 in Fort Wayne to work on Army field radios for soldiers in the
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His later years were spent trying to perfect antenna designs, applying the work of
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and wanted to avoid a similar fate in his own life.
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Elisha Gray and
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532:U.S. patent 3,449,750
453:Farnsworth Television
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485:invention of radio
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417:Guadalcanal
413:Vietnam War
368:Later years
348:'s work on
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279:Elisha Gray
277:, although
255:full duplex
211:Role models
142:New Georgia
130:Guadalcanal
58:Akron, Ohio
38:(June 1966)
599:Categories
518:References
445:Fort Wayne
266:amplifiers
50:1920-02-02
404:in 1969.
291:diaphragm
91:Scientist
491:See also
429:Magnavox
409:Magnavox
398:Magnavox
376:and the
335:Ethernet
311:AM radio
303:FM radio
108:Born in
87:Inventor
581:YouTube
570:YouTube
423:in the
331:wavelet
273:in the
118:US Army
467:Trivia
239:, and
566:Video
502:Radio
455:from
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120:as a
110:Akron
419:and
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