DC -- Downtown -- Franklin School (963 13th St NW):
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- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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IP Address: 54.242.191.214 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- FRANK_160218_12.JPG: The 1992 date is the date when the exterior of the building was restored. Other dates in the history:
* 1977: Broad of Education votes to restore Sumner and Franklin Schools
* 1986: Sumner School restored and opened to public.
* 1992: Exterior of Franklin School restored.
* 1996: The Franklin designated a National Historic Landmark.
* 2002-2008: Franklin School used as a homeless shelter.
* 2003: City advertises for a tenant for Franklin School.
* 2004: DC Preservation League lists Franklin as endangered due to lack of use and maintenance, threatening historic interior.
* 2005: City issues Request for Proposal to develop Franklin School.
* 2009: City issues another Request for Proposal to develop Franklin School.
* 2011: School briefly occupied by protesters associated with the Occupy movement.
* 2015: Mayor Muriel Bowser cancels planned conversion of the school to a public facility for art exhibitions, lectures and educational activities by the Institute for Contemporary Expression.
- FRANK_160218_33.JPG: The 1868 date is the date the building was completed
- FRANK_160218_40.JPG: You can barely see the pigeon screens
- FRANK_160218_51.JPG: Moon rising behind the Franklin School Thursday afternoon
- FRANK_160218_59.JPG: From the top floor of this building was sent on June 3, 1880 over a beam of light to 1325 L Street the first wireless telephone message in the history of the world.
The apparatus used in sending the message was the photophone invented by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.
This plaque was placed here by Alexander Graham Bell chapter Telephone Pioneers of America March 3, 1947 the centennial of Dr. Bell's birth.
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Photophone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The photophone (later given the alternate name radiophone) is a telecommunications device that allowed for the transmission of speech on a beam of light. It was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880, at Bell's laboratory at 1325 L Street in Washington, D.C. Both were later to become full associates in the Volta Laboratory Association, created and financed by Bell.
On June 3, 1880, Bell's assistant transmitted a wireless voice telephone message from the roof of the Franklin School to the window of Bell's laboratory, some 213 meters (about 700 ft.) away.
Bell believed the photophone was his most important invention. Of the 18 patents granted in Bell's name alone, and the 12 he shared with his collaborators, four were for the photophone, which Bell referred to as his "greatest achievement", telling a reporter shortly before his death that the photophone was "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone".
The photophone was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems that achieved worldwide popular usage starting in the 1980s. The master patent for the photophone (U.S. Patent 235,199 Apparatus for Signalling and Communicating, called Photophone) was issued in December 1880, many decades before its principles came to have practical applications.
- Wikipedia Description: Franklin School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Franklin School is a building designed by Adolph Cluss located on Franklin Square at 13th and K Street in Washington, DC. Built in 1869, the structure is currently unoccupied but has been used as a homeless shelter since 2002.
A small plaque on the building describes the building's place in the history of telecommunications, when a beam of light was first used to transmit sound waves using the photophone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].