Bell, Alexander Graham

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Alexander Graham Bell

Born March 3, 1847

Edinburgh, Scotland

Died August 2, 1922

Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada

Inventor of the telephone

"All really big discoveries are the results of thought."

I t is possible that Alexander Graham Bell is the world's bestknown inventor. He is well known for inventing the telephone. This device would completely change how people communicated: Soon it became possible to talk instantly with anyone in the world with access to a telephone. Bell also worked in many other fields, including aviation, the design and manufacture of aircraft. He invented the hydrofoil, a craft that skims above the surface of the water.

Born into a family of speech experts

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847 to a family of experts in human speech. His grandfather, Alexander Bell, taught elocution, the art of speaking clearly, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), was also an expert in elocution and the physiology of speech. (Physiology is a branch of biology that studies the functions of living matter, such as body organs. The physiology of speech involves the study of the mouth, tongue, throat, and voicebox, for example.) It was thus not a surprise that the young Bell entered into the same field as his elders. Bell's mother was Elisa Grace Symonds Bell, a painter who was mostly deaf.

Bell's first job after graduating from the University of Edinburgh and University College in London was to assist his father on a project he called "visual speech"—teaching deaf people to speak by imitating the movements of the lips of the teacher. (Children learn how to speak by imitating sounds they hear; the deaf cannot do this.)

In 1870, the Bell family moved to Canada, and shortly afterwards Bell got a job teaching in Boston, Massachusetts, at a school for the deaf, the first public school established especially for deaf children. He also took in private students and later became a professor of speech at Boston University, in 1873. Bell was a leader in the field of teaching the deaf. He organized conventions for other teachers of the deaf and founded the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf.

Over the next three years, Bell conducted experiments with a variety of devices in connection with his work with the deaf. He received financial support from, among others, Gardner Hubbard (1822–1897), whose daughter was one of Bell's students and also his future wife. Hubbard was interested in Bell's idea for sending more than one telegraph message over the same wires at the same time. At the time, the Western Union company had a monopoly on, or complete control over, sending telegrams, the written messages created by alternating short and long tones ("dots" and "dashes") over wires. At the time, the telegraph was the fastest way of communicating over long distances. Bell persuaded Hubbard and other investors that it might be possible to send several messages at the same time by generating different tones (comparable to musical notes), one for each message.

His work on what was called a "harmonic telegraph" gave Bell the further idea that a whole range of messages could be sent over wires and made to simulate the human voice. Bell called this version of his work an "electronic speaking telegraph," which eventually became known as the telephone. The underlying idea was that electrical impulses sent over wires could make an object at the other end move or make a sound, much as the telegraph invented by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872).

The telephone

Bell's work with the telegraph led directly to the telephone. He started by developing a way to send more than one message at a time over a single telegraph wire by using different harmonics, or tones (like notes on a musical scale). From this work, Bell got the idea of sending the sounds of a voice by developing what he called a "harmonic telegraph." In other words, if it were possible to send different musical notes over a telegraph wire, why not send the whole range of sounds that create a human voice?

To help in his work, Bell hired an assistant, Thomas A. Watson (1854–1934), whose job was to make the actual equipment suggested by Bell. The telephone was not the result of years and years of experimentation. Bell and Watson first managed to transmit a single musical note on June 2, 1875. Only eight months later, a lawyer for Bell filed a patent application in Washington, on February 14, 1876. (A patent is granted by the government to the first person to come up with a new invention; for a specific period of time, a patent gives the inventor the right to insist on payment from anyone else who uses the patented device or process.) On the same day that Bell applied for his patent, another inventor, Elisha Gray (1835–1901), filed a document indicating that he intended to apply for a similar patent. But Bell was there first. On March 7, 1876, the patent office granted Bell a patent for an "electric speaking telephone," thought to be the most valuable single patent ever granted. Bell had turned twenty-nine years old just four days earlier.

The story of Bell's first demonstration of the telephone is famous. Experimenting with the device, Bell spilled acid on himself and, perhaps unthinking, said into the instrument: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." The message was recorded as the first message transmitted by telephone, on March 10, 1876. A little over a year later, in April 1877, Bell succeeded in conducting a conversation between Boston and New York City. In July 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was established to promote use of the invention on a wide scale.

Bell's patent for the telephone was challenged by many other inventors who claimed to have already developed the same technology. Bell's claim to have been the first to invent the telephone was upheld in about six hundred cases, victories that enabled Bell to claim the exclusive, or sole, right to use his technology in building a communications network.

Bell was able to pursue both his invention and its business success. In 1884, a company formed by Bell built a telephone line linking Boston and New York. The next year, Bell and his colleagues organized the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which was destined to dominate the U.S. telephone business for a century.

The Impact of Bell's Invention

The telephone became one of the most significant and widespread inventions of the modern era. In the period since Bell obtained a patent on the instrument, telephones have spread everywhere and made a major impact on the way people relate to one another and do business.

Within three years of its invention, there were about five thousand telephones in use, all on private lines.

Although the telephone became a dominant means of communication, success was not immediate. Bell demonstrated his invention throughout the United States and in Europe. In Europe, messengers were used to send notes back and forth

for quick communication, and the relative high cost of telephones and the low wages of messengers kept this system in use far longer than in the United States, where the telephone caught on more quickly. Initially, the cost of connecting telephones between two offices was about a year's wages for a messenger. Moreover, investors in the telegraph system were not eager to see a competing system succeed. Nevertheless, the ability to talk to someone over a great distance was so attractive that the telephone soon outpaced telegraphy as the preferred means of instant communication.

Bell won about ten thousand dollars from the government of France as a reward for his invention, and he used the money to start the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. The laboratory worked on numerous inventions in the 1880s, including production of the first successful phonograph record. (The phonograph record is a vinyl cylinder used before the invention of the compact disc to record and play back sounds, especially music.) With profits from that invention, Bell established the Volta Bureau to study deafness, which had been Bell's first interest.

A lifetime of inventions

There is no doubt that Bell's invention of the telephone would have ensured him a place in history even if he had retired immediately after his first conversation. In fact, however, Bell was an inventive genius who was involved in many other fields. Bell was instrumental in founding Science magazine, which became the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1880. He contributed many articles to it. He also was president of the National Geographic Society, an organization devoted to exploring the earth, from 1896 to 1904.

Bell and the Deaf

Alexander Graham Bell always had a special relationship with the deaf. His mother, Elisa, was deaf, and even as a child, Bell tried to communicate with her by transmitting the vibrations of his voice through her skin. Most people shouted into a funnel-like device that Mrs. Bell held in her ear.

After moving to Boston, Bell began teaching deaf students, one of whom, Mabel Hubbard, he married in 1877. Another of his students was Helen Keller (1880–1968), who was blind and deaf from age two. Keller achieved worldwide fame with an inspiring victory over her disabilities, graduating from Radcliffe College, a part of Harvard University. Bell and Keller remained lifelong friends.

Bell's work with the deaf began with a technique called "visible speech," a technique developed by Bell's father that used illustrations to show the deaf how to place their tongue and lips to form words. It is a technique still used in the twenty-first century.

After 1895, Bell focused his genius on aviation. He worked on a kite capable of carrying a person and being steered. He designed a successful hydroplane, a high-speed boat that skims over the water. He also designed the aileron, the device at the rear of an airplane wing that alters the wing's shape and enables the plane to turn in different directions while flying.

Recognition and honors

Bell was widely recognized as one of the leading inventors of the late nineteenth century. He became wealthy as a result of his patent on the telephone and was a major contributor to a series of institutions that supported scientific research.

Universities including Harvard (in the United States), Oxford (in England), Heidelberg (in Germany), and Edinburgh (in Scotland) awarded him honorary degrees. In 1917, the governor general of Canada opened a memorial in his honor near the house where he lived after leaving Scotland for Canada on his way to the United States. (Bell became a U.S. citizen in 1882.)

Bell owned a large estate in Nova Scotia. He died there during a summer vacation, on August 2, 1922.

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Bruce, Robert V. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little Brown, 1973. Reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Costain, Thomas B. The Chord of Steel: The Story of the Invention of the Telephone. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960.

Mackay, James A. Alexander Graham Bell: A Life. New York: J. Wiley, 1997.

Waite, Helen Elmira. Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1961.

Periodicals

Bruce, Robert V., and Ira Block. "Alexander Graham Bell." National Geographic (September 1988): p. 358.

Gordon, John Steele. "The Death of a Monopoly: AT&T Protected Its Interests with the Fiercest Vigilance—and Thereby Helped Bring Itself Down." American Heritage (April 1997): p. 16.

John, Richard R. "The Politics of Innovation." Daedalus (Fall 1998): p. 187.

Keller, John J. "Bell's Baby: Alexander Graham Bell's Proudest Invention Wasn't the Telephone." The Wall Street Journal (May 18, 1992): p. R16.