BELL, ALEXANDER GRAHAM

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), at age twenty-nine, invented the telephone. A year later he founded the Bell Telephone Company, which later became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Throughout the remainder of his long and productive life, Bell continued his work as an inventor, eventually securing eighteen patents in his name. In addition he maintained a lifelong commitment to the education of the deaf.

Bell was born in 1847 Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of eminent speech educators and musicians. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught speech to the deaf and the mute and wrote textbooks on correct speech. Bell's mother was a portrait painter and an accomplished musician. Bell received his early education at home and graduated at age fourteen from the Royal High School, Edinburgh. He then enrolled as a student teacher at Weston House, a nearby boys' school, where he taught music and speech and in turn received instruction in other subjects. Bell also studied briefly at Edinburgh University. In his late teens, Bell worked as an assistant to his father, promoting "visible" speech, a system developed by his father that shows the articulation of sound on the lips, tongue, and throat. Bell became deeply interested in the study of sound, especially as it affects hearing and speech, and he followed this interest throughout his life.

When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, their father took the family to the healthier climate of Ontario, Canada, in 1870. Bell soon moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and in 1872 opened his own school for training teachers of the deaf. In 1873 he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.

Bell's interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. Backed financially in his investigations by Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, grateful fathers of two of his deaf pupils, he 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.

Early in 1874 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 endless hours 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. However, at the urging of his financial backers, who were more interested in the potential of the harmonic telegraph, Bell did not pursue the idea for several months. He resumed work on the telephone in 1875 and by September began to write the required patent specifications.

Bell's patent, U.S. Patent No. 174,465, was granted on March 7, 1876, and on March 10, the first message transmitted by telephone passed from Bell to Watson in their workshop: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" After a year of refining the new device Watson and Bell, along with their two backers Hubbard and Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Soon afterwards Bell married Mabel Hubbard, his former speech student and daughter of his new partner, and sailed to England for a yearlong honeymoon.

Bell's claim to have invented the telephone was challenged in more than 600 lawsuits. The courts eventually upheld 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, stayed away from the telegraph. In 1878, 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 his work as an inventor. Bell won France's Volta Prize for his telephone invention and received 50,000 francs in prize money. With this reward he established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., primarily for research on deafness. Among the new devices he and his fellow scientists at the laboratory invented were the graphophone, a device for recording sound on wax cylinders or disks (an advance that made Thomas Edison's (1847–1931) phonograph commercially viable); the photophone, used for transmitting speech on a beam of light; a telephone probe, used in surgery until the discovery of the X-ray; an audiometer; and an induction balance for detecting metal within the human body.

Working with collaborators at the Volta Laboratory and at another scientific facility he established near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Bell invented a prototype air conditioning system, an improved strain of sheep, an early iron lung, solar distillation of water, and the sonar detection of icebergs. The possibility of flight fascinated Bell. He built tetrahedral kites capable of carrying a human being and supported pioneering experiments in aviation. He also designed a hydrofoil boat that set the world water speed record in 1918.

Bell retained his dual interests in education of the deaf and invention throughout his later life. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882 and established several organizations to support teaching of the deaf, including the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890, later known as the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf. He was also influential in the founding of Science magazine and the National Geographic Society. Bell died in 1922.

BELL, ALEXANDER GRAHAM

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