Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell is remembered as the inventor of the telephone. He was also an outstanding teacher of the deaf, an inventor of many other devices, and a leading figure in the scientific community. Bell invented the graphophone, the first sound recorder, as well as the photo-phone, which transmitted speech by light rays. Among his other innovations were the audiometer, a device used to measure hearing; the induction balance, used to locate metallic objects in the human body; and disc and cylindrical wax recorders for phonographs.

Early life

Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of eminent speech educators and musicians. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught speech to the hearing and speech impaired and wrote textbooks on correct speech. Bell's mother was a portrait painter and an accomplished musician.

Bell received his early education at home. He graduated at age fourteen from the Royal High School in Edinburgh. Bell then enrolled as a student teacher at Weston House, a nearby boys’ school, where he taught music and speech and, in return, received instruction in other subjects.

Experiments with harmonic telegraph

Bell's father had invented “visible” speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used to teach deaf people to speak. Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868 to 1870. During these years, he became deeply interested in the study of sound, especially as it affects hearing and speech. Bell followed this interest throughout his life, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing speech.

Bell's interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. With financial assistance from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, grateful fathers of two of his deaf pupils, Bell experimented with developing the harmonic telegraph, a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a single wire. Using vibrating membranes and an actual human ear in his tests, Bell also investigated the possibility of transmitting the human voice by wire.

Invention of the telephone

Early in 1874, after having emigrated to the United States a few years earlier, Bell met Thomas A. Watson (1854–1934), a young machinist and technician with expertise in electrical engineering. Watson became Bell's indispensable assistant and the two spent substantial time together experimenting with transmitting sound.

In the summer of 1874, Bell developed the basic concept of the telephone using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the sound waves of human speech over a wire. At the urging of his financial backers, however, who were more interested in the potential of the harmonic telegraph, Bell did not pursue the telephone idea for several months. He resumed work on it in 1875 and, by September, began to write the required patent specifications.

Bell received his patent on March 7, 1876, and on March 10, the first official message transmitted by telephone passed from Bell to Watson in their workshop: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!”

Founds Bell Telephone

After a year of refining the new device, Watson and Bell, along with Hubbard and Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. The Bell Company built the first long-distance line in 1884, connecting Boston and New York. Bell and others organized the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885 to operate other long-distance lines. By 1889, when insulation was perfected, 11,000 miles of underground wires travelled through New York City.

Bell's claim to the invention of the telephone was challenged in more than six hundred lawsuits. The courts eventually approved Bell's patent, and the Bell Company's principal competitor, Western Union Telegraph, agreed to stay out of the telephone business. The Bell Company, in turn, ceased work on the telegraph. In 1899, with the sale of the Bell Company to a group of investors, Bell's financial future was secure and he could devote the rest of his life to working as an inventor.

Bell's later interests

The magazine Science (later the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) was founded in 1880 because of Bell's efforts. As National Geographic Society president from 1896 to 1904, Bell fostered the success of the society and its publications. In 1898, he became a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He was also involved in sheep breeding, hydrodynamics (the dynamics of fluids in motion), and aviation projects.

Bell died in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1922.