Bell, Alexander Graham

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Alexander Graham Bell

Born March 3, 1847 (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Died August 2, 1922 (Nova Scotia, Canada)

Inventor

Teacher

Alexander Graham Bell's most famous invention, the telephone, was the result of his primary career focus: teaching the deaf to speak. Bell had been successful in his work with the hearing-impaired and had instructed a generation of teachers in his methods. He sought to reproduce human speech by creating a machine with a wire that could be vibrated by the voice. Backed by a team of eager financial supporters, Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson (1854–1934), perfected their speech-transmission device in March 1876. Their invention revolutionized communication and created an entirely new industry.

"Business is hateful to me at all times."

Bell family background

Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the middle child of three sons. He shared the same given name as his well-known grandfather, who was a professor of elocution (the art of public speaking in which gesture, vocal production, and delivery were emphasized) in London, England, and the author of several books on speech impediments and pronunciation. Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, carried out similar research on human speech and elocution and devised a system he called visible speech. This was a set of symbols that indicated the proper position of the lips, throat, and tongue for each of the sounds produced by the human voice. It was the first universal phonetic alphabet, and was originally created by Bell's father as a learning tool for foreign languages. He realized that it could also be used to teach the sounds of speech to the deaf, an important discovery in his own household, for his wife and Bell's mother, Eliza Grace Symonds, began to lose her hearing in the late 1850s.

Bell was taught at home by his mother when he was very young, but at the age of ten he entered McLauren's Academy in Edinburgh. He finished at the city's Royal High School at the age of thirteen. He spent several months with his grandfather in London and then took a student teaching position at the Weston House Academy in Elgin, Scotland. He was already conducting experiments in speech with his brother, once building a skull that spoke the word "ma-ma" when air was blown through it. He became particularly fascinated by the work of a German scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), which involved reproducing vowel sounds with the help of tuning forks that had been wired with a basic electrical current.

When Alexander Bell, the grandfather, died in 1865, Bell's father relocated to London in order to continue his work. The twenty-year-old Bell joined him there in 1867, the same year his younger brother, Edward, died of tuberculosis, an infectious disease of the lungs. In 1868 Bell enrolled at University College in London, where he studied anatomy and physiology. He also carried on his father's research work on visible speech while his father visited the United States on an extended lecture tour in 1868. Melville Bell's book, Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabets had failed to attract much attention in European scientific circles, and when Melly, the eldest of the three Bell sons, also died of tuberculosis, the family decided to move to Canada for its better climate. They settled in Brantford, Ontario, in August 1870.

Bell in Boston

Bell continued to experiment with various means of reproducing sound and began working on his version of a harmonic telegraph, which could tell the difference between various musical notes. It had a potentially profitable use in the field of telegraphy, the first electronic form of communication. A working transmitter that used this principle would allow the transmission of several messages across a single telegraph wire, thereby reducing costs significantly.

Bell's main focus during these years, however, was teaching the deaf, which grew out of his work with visible speech. He devised a method to notate his father's work and was invited to come to Boston, Massachusetts, to train teachers of the deaf there. By late 1872 he had founded his own school in the city, and the following year he became a professor of vocal physiology and the mechanics of speech at Boston University's School of Oratory. He became well known for his methods and was a leading advocate in his time for teaching the deaf to communicate orally. Sign language was another means of communication for the hearing-impaired, but Bell recognized that there were varying degrees of deafness. Some students, he discovered, could be taught the phonetic sounds of the alphabet, and how to use them to communicate orally.

Bell took private pupils occasionally, and in 1873 he moved in with a wealthy family in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to teach their son, who had been deaf since birth. The boy's progress under Bell's education so impressed the father, Thomas Sanders, that the prosperous leather merchant offered to finance Bell's scientific experiments in the harmonic telegraph and the phonautograph, another invention he was working on at the time. The phonautograph, based on an earlier version created by a French inventor, Leon Scott (1817–1879), would help deaf students correct their tone. Both of these research projects led Bell to the creation of the telephone.

Teamed with Watson

By 1874 Bell learned that Elisha Gray (1835–1901), an employee of the Chicago-based Western Electric Company, which supplied the relays and other equipment to the telegraph industry, was also working on a project similar to the harmonic telegraph for the transmission of sounds through electrical current. Thomas Sanders and another backer, a well-connected Bostonian named Gardiner G. Hubbard who was also president of a school for the deaf, urged Bell to file the paperwork for a patent. A patent is a legal document giving an inventor the exclusive right to make, use, or sell an invention for a certain term of years. In early 1875 Bell began working out of an electrical shop on Court Street in Boston, and teamed there with a young assistant to perfect his harmonic telegraph. Thomas Watson was a skilled machinist from Salem, Massachusetts, who had a particular expertise in electrical engineering, which Bell lacked.

The first of Bell's two important patents, No. 161,739, for an "Improvement in Transmitters and Receivers for Electrical Telegraphs," was filed on April 6, 1875. Two months later Bell realized when tuning the reeds of his harmonic telegraph model that a steel spring could reproduce both the tone and the overtones (higher notes) that gave the sound the necessary complexity similar to human speech, and therefore made it understandable to the listener. He instructed Watson to develop a new device, and the next day they tested it. Watson could hear Bell's voice but could not understand all of the words. They kept making improvements, and finally, on March 10, 1876, Watson brought over a new transmitter to the Boston rooming house where Bell was then living and working. They went into separate rooms, and Bell said the famous words, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you," the first words ever spoken by telephone.

No. 178,399, the second significant patent of Bell's career, was filed on June 6, 1876, for a Telephonic Telegraph Receiver. A few weeks later, Bell demonstrated it before a well-respected panel at the International Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He then spent the next several months working with Watson on perfecting a transmitter. On April 3, 1877, they conducted the first telephone conversation, which occurred over telegraph wires between Boston and New York. By the end of May of that same year, they had installed a working telephone line in Boston that ran between the offices of two bankers, as well as another that ran from the banker's office to his home in nearby Somerville. In July 1877, Bell and Watson, along with Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard, became partners in the newly formed Bell Telephone Company.

Milestones in Telephone History

1878:: First local telephone exchange in the United States established in New Haven, Connecticut.
1885:: First long distance line installed between New York and Philadelphia.
1892:: New York to Chicago long-distance service begins; rate is $9 for the first five minutes.
1915:: First transcontinental telephone runs between New York and San Francisco, California; rate is $20.70 for the first three minutes.
1919:: AT&T introduces the first dial telephones in Norfolk, Virginia.
1927:: Transatlantic service begins from New York to London; rate is $75 for the first three minutes.
1934:: Transpacific telephone service begins between the United States and Japan.
1946:: AT&T introduces early mobile telephone service using antennas.
1951:: Direct-dialing for long-distance telephone calls begins in New Jersey.
1958:: First commercial modem introduced by AT&T.
1963:: Touch-tone telephones introduced in Pennsylvania.
1974:: Direct-dialing for international long-distance calls begins.
1983:: Chicago area is site of first commercial cellular telephone system.

Two days after the company was formed Bell married Mabel G. Hubbard, the deaf daughter of his financial backer. In August the couple sailed for Europe, where they spent their honeymoon month demonstrating the telephone to excited audiences across England and France.

Achieved world fame with his invention

The success of Bell's invention, and of the company named after him, was not without some accompanying drama. The Western Union Telegraph Company filed a patent-infringement lawsuit, based on a caveat (a legal warning to stop proceedings) Elisha Gray had filed with the U.S. Patent Office in February 1876, and that and other legal battles went on for a number of years. In total there were nearly six hundred lawsuits filed against Bell and the company, but the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled in his favor. In another settlement, Western Union agreed to not venture into telephone service, and in return Bell's company agreed to stay out of the telegraph business.

Bell's telephone business remained his secondary career. He considered himself primarily an inventor and remained actively involved in teaching deaf students. In 1880, when he received the Volta Prize for scientific achievement from the French government, he established the Volta Laboratory with the prize money to further his research efforts in both fields. He constructed a photophone, which could transmit speech through a ray of light, and the first working metal detector, which was tested on President James A. Garfield (1831–1881; served March-September 1881). He improved on the early phonograph invented by Thomas Edison (1847–1931; see entry) by creating a wax cylinder that vastly improved the quality of the recorded sound, and sold his 1886 patents for this.

With the money he earned from those patents, Bell established the Laboratory Volta Bureau for the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge Relating to the Deaf, which was associated with the American Association for the Promotion of the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. He served as president of the organization and wrote books about the hearing-impaired, including his 1884 work The Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. Although he was married to a deaf woman, Bell advocated enforced sterilization (a medical process by which a person was rendered unable to produce children) for deaf women and the criminalization of marriage between two deaf people. Such attitudes were not unusual in his era, and Bell believed such measures would help eliminate congenital (existing from birth) deafness in following generations.

Other inventions and achievements

Bell's list of other scientific projects was impressive. He invented a tetrahedral kite, which demonstrated to aviation skeptics that an object with a large surface area could still be light enough to achieve flight; an early air conditioning system; a device that used sonar waves to locate icebergs under water; and one of the first working iron lungs, a machine used for artificial respiration. He was fascinated by flight and founded the Aerial Experiment Association in 1907. From 1914 to 1918 he worked on a motorboat that reached a speed of seventy-one miles per hour. He also cofounded the magazine Science, which later became the periodical of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and served as president of the National Geographic Society from 1896 to 1904. He was a member of the governing board of the Smithsonian Institution after 1898 and earned numerous honors during his lifetime.

The Bell Telephone Company went through numerous changes, even in its early years, but was a success from its formation and continued to be an innovator in its field. By 1878 Bell had sold his part of the business, and seven years later it became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). In 1913, with government approval, AT&T became a monopoly (a company holding the exclusive right to produce or sell a particular good or service). Telephone service became a necessary element in commerce and in daily life after 1945, and by 1960 only 21 percent of U.S. households were without a telephone. That rate fell sharply to 2.4 percent by 2000, according to U.S. Census data. AT&T retained its monopoly until 1984, when it agreed to break up its local regional operating companies into the so-called Baby Bells, among them Nynex in New England and SBC, which was formerly known as Southwestern Bell of Texas.

Bell became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882. He spent his summers on an estate in Nova Scotia, called Beinn Bhreagh, and died there on August 2, 1922. During his burial at nearby Bras d'Or Lakes, all telephones in North America went silent in honor of his achievement.