Bell, Alexander Graham

Bell, Alexander Graham (1847–1922), inventor of the telephone and educator of the deaf.Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son and grandson of speech teachers, Bell immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1870 and then moved to Boston as a teacher of speech to the deaf. Driven to match his father's prominence as a speech analyst, he undertook research in acoustics and speech with the aid of electrical and mechanical devices. In 1873 he was appointed professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. This position gave him standing in scientific circles, and Boston's leadership in American technology gave him access to technical expertise.

His combined work in sound and electricity led him to devise a means of transmitting several telegraphic messages at once over a single wire by superimposing intermittent currents of differing frequencies. In 1874, while struggling to perfect his multiple or “harmonic” telegraph, he experimented with a continuous but varying or “undulatory” current and suddenly saw that it possessed not only the varying frequencies but also the varying amplitudes essential to the reproduction of speech and all other sounds. On 7 March 1876, he patented the telephone. Three days later, he addressed to his assistant the famous first intelligible sentence transmitted by telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

Thomas A. Watson came, and so did fame and fortune. In 1877 Bell and three others organized a voluntary association, incorporated in 1878 as the Bell Telephone Company. After decisively defeating a swarm of litigants claiming priority of conception he pursued a multitude of ideas and causes. Sometimes chided for scattering his energies too widely, he nevertheless followed a consistent goal, that of furthering communication and community. He also strove to overcome his own lifelong tendency toward solitude. He organized and campaigned for the teaching of lipreading and speech to the deaf, always stating his vocation as “teacher of the deaf” on official forms. He invented the audiometer to measure hearing, and his name entered the language in the word “decibel,” a standard unit of sound volume. The deaf and blind Helen Keller (1880–1968) dedicated her autobiography to him as a mentor and protector. He led in promoting the method of teaching small children developed by the Italian educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952).

As an inventor, he abandoned telephony in the 1880s after inventing the “photophone,” which transmitted speech by means of light rays but was of little use without lasers and fiber optics. The death of his newborn son from respiratory failure in 1881 moved him to invent a “vacuum jacket” that anticipated the “iron lung” of the polio era, and the shooting of President James Garfield that same year prompted him to devise a “telephone probe” that sounded when it encountered metal—such as a bullet—in flesh. The probe saved many soldiers' lives before X rays superseded it. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Bell organized research that advanced aviation and hydrofoil boats. In designing aircraft his use of tetrahedral structural elements inspired him to develop and patent a system of space frame architecture. In 1883 Bell and his father‐in‐law rescued the weekly journal Science from financial collapse and continued to subsidize it until 1894. In 1900 it became the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which it remains to this day. He also served as a guiding spirit of the National Geographic Society and its phenomenally successful magazine.

When Bell died of diabetes at the age of seventy‐five, his erstwhile rival and later friend Thomas Edison praised him as having “brought the human family in closer touch.” Bell's brilliant coupling of sound waves and electrical pulsations had given rise to the telecommunications revolution.

Bibliography

Robert V. Bruce , Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, 1973; reprints 1990, 1995, 1998.

Robert V. Bruce