Alexander Graham Bell Biography
by Krysta CardinaleAlexander Graham Bell was an immigrant from Scotland. He was a scientist and inventor whose mother and wife were both deaf. He also had a lifelong fascination with the human voice. At the age of twenty-five, he founded a school for deaf children and began creating devices to help people hear. His experiments with an apparatus called the harmonic telegraph convinced him that electrical wiring could carry different vibrations of sound, and could even sound as unique in tone and range as the human voice. With the help of Thomas Watson, an electrical machinist, the Alexander Graham Bell telephone was invented, and then later the first transcontinental phone call. Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone became forever linked in history.
Alexander Graham Bell’s Early Years
On March 3, 1847 Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Bell adopted the middle name “Graham” himself out of his admiration of Alexander Graham, a family friend. Throughout his life, Bell was always surrounded by those with an interest in vocal communication. His grandfather, uncle, and father were all elocutionists. Elocution is the study of formal speaking in accordance with grammar, pronunciation, tone, and style.
Bell attended school at Royal High School in Edinburgh. He graduated by the age of thirteen, and was a student-teacher of elocution and music by the age of sixteen at Weston House Academy, in Elgin, Moray, Scotland. He attended The University College London where he graduated. Bell turned his interests towards acoustics and began a mission to conquer his mother’s deafness.
In 1870, Bell and his family immigrated to Brantford, Canada. While in Canada, he continued his pursuit of the study of acoustics and telephony. Bell came up with a design for a piano that was able to transmit music to a distance with the use of electricity. Three years later he went with his father to Montreal where he taught the system of visible speech. After his father turned it down, Alexander was given the position as a Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.
During his stay at Boston University, Bell continued his research to produce a device that would send not only music notes, but speech. On March 7, 1876 the U.S. Patent Office granted Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone Patent Number 174,465. Bell married the following year on July 11th to one of his students from Boston University, Mabel Hubbard. Hubbard was deaf and mute. In 1882, Alexander became a United States Citizen. The following year he was one of the members who founded the National Geographic Society, and eventually became its second president.
The Telephone and the First Transcontinental Phone Call
To craft precision parts for his idea, Bell hired Thomas Watson, an electrical machinist by trade. Bell’s eccentric ideas fired up Watson. Watson’s engineering expertise inspired Bell. On March 10, 1876 Watson delivered a transmitter to Bell powered by a battery. On the top floor of number 5, Exeter Place; Watson hurried down the hall to the room where he’d set up his receiver. There he listened. But as Bell was about to speak into the new instrument, a motion of his arm spilled a jar of acid over his clothes. In the excitement of the accident, Bell called out, ‘Mr. Watson come here I want you.’ The big mouthpiece picked up his call for help and Watson heard every word of it through the receiver at his ear. The new transmitter was better than they had expected or had dared hoped.
A few months after this accident, the Thomas Watson and Alexander Graham Bell telephone was produced for a demonstration at the 1876 Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. Away from the crowds, Bell spoke into his transmitter. On the exhibition floor, Don Pedro the emperor of Brazil exclaimed, “My God it talks!”
Bell and Watson, unknown inventors from Boston dazzled the public with their invention. By October they were able to conduct the first two-way conversation. Watson was in a factory in Cambridge Port, and Bell was two miles way in Boston.
The first switchboard was installed in New Haven the following year. Soon after, lightweight copper wire replaced iron. This made suspended phone lines possible. The rapidly expanding Bell Telephone Company turned west connecting with Chicago by 1892. Phone lines stretched further, the goal was a transcontinental service.
But in Denver, engineers met with an obstacle. The signal from New York grew weak and voices became barely audible. Thicker wires were used but the problem persisted. Then in 1906, an amplifier was invented that eventually boosted signals loud enough to reach the far west.
Alexander Graham Bell spoke into a mouthpiece on January 25th, 1915 in New York. His voice traveled across the nation to San Francisco where Thomas Watson, his longtime collaborator heard him. For this first transcontinental phone call, Alexander Graham Bell repeated the words he spoke to Watson almost 40 years earlier when together they built an ingenious device that revolutionized human communication – the telephone.
“And even when he spoke into a reproduction on his first telephone, his voice brought clearly to me the words of that now historic first sentence, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.’” –Watson
In the years to come, the telephone along with the telegraph transformed the battlefields of World War I, tying command post to trenches instantly.
By the 1920s the telephone had become a common piece of household furniture, and phone lines crisscrossed the nation. This launched an era of global communication that Bell and Watson could only dream of.
Additional Facts about Bell
In addition the Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, he had other inventions and designs. He worked with medical research and established techniques for the deaf speech. He invented a photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light that was the background for today’s optical fiber system. Other designs included primitive means for a tape recorder, hard disc and floppy disc drive, and a primitive form of air conditioning, the latter of which he had in his home. He also held patents on the telegraph and the phonograph. In all Bell had eighteen patents in his name alone, and then twelve more in collaboration with other people.
In 1922, Alexander Graham Bell died in Beinn Bhreaghm, which is located on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. He was buried on top of the Beinn Bhreaghm Mountain, and was survived by his wife and four children.
