Hello! Alexander Graham Bell
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Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. He didn't get his middle name until he was 11, though. His grandfather was an expert on speech disorders and phonetics, and his father (all three named Alexander, by the way) was a university lecturer on philology but who focused on helping deaf people learn to speak well. His mother was almost deaf yet managed to become an accomplished pianist. So, speaking and listening were immediately part of young Alexander's life. What more led him to his scientific accomplishments, and what were they?
He was an average student and quit high school because he didn't like the compulsory curriculum. Aside from just 2 years of formal schooling, he was home schooled by his mother. She had instilled a strong sense of curiosity of the world in him. As a result, at age 12 he observed the slow process of husking wheat grain as he played with friends in their father's grain mill. At that father's urging to "do something useful", he then built a machine with rotating paddles and nail brushes that more easily removed the husks from the grain. His friend's father then allowed him to tinker in the machine shop on other projects.
In 1862, he spent a year with his 72-year-old grandfather, who treated him differently than his sarcastic, authoritarian father had. He gave his grandson independence, a better sense in what he wore in public, and an outlook on mankind that all deserved an education. This restored his appreciation for learning and made him think of attending university. Bell called this year a turning point in his life and that it "converted me from a boy somewhat prematurely into a man".
His father introduced him to scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone, who was studying telegraphy and the transmission of sound. Wheatstone had improved upon a "speaking machine" originally invented in 1769 by Russian professor Christian Kratzenstein, and then in 1791 by Wolfgang von Kempelen.
Using Kempelen's book, Alexander and his older brother Melville reconstructed the device with their own improvements. Wheatstone's version could mechanically make a few simple words. Alexander and Melville did a little more, but the biggest result was both of them learning more deeply about the organs for speech.
Bored at home after that, and now being treated as a child again by his father, Alexander almost ran away to be a sailor. Instead, he found an advertisement for a "pupil-teacher" in music and elocution in a place called Weston House in Elgin, about 170 miles to the north of Edinburgh, not far to the east of Inverness on the coast. Weston House was a school for the "Board and Education of Young Gentlemen".
Alexander taught not only elocution there, but since he had taught himself how to read and play piano music as a child, he taught that to students, too. His experience with his grandfather paid off, because nobody noticed he was younger than many of his students.
His father had begun publishing in 1864 on a system of speaking called Visible Speech, which was intended to show the deaf how to better pronounce words through phonetic symbols and the positioning of mouth, lips, teeth, and tongue. So, at 17, young Alexander helped him provide public demonstrations and amazed people, especially when he could use the process to pronounce words even in other languages! He'd learned it all in just five weeks.
His first experiments on vocal sounds were conducted informally in 1866 at 19 after he noticed that vowels are comprised of two pitches -- one rising, one falling. When he compared that to the sounds made by blowing across bottles with different amounts of water inside, he had a brainstorm. By putting a tuning fork in front of his mouth and voicing vowels, he determined which shape of his mouth and tongue caused the fork to resonate for a similar reason. When he learned that accomplished scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz had already learned about this, he was initially disappointed. But after he studied Helmholtz's book, he got the idea to try producing consonants as well as vowels using electrical theory. (The telegraph had already been invented in 1837 by Cooke and Wheatstone, and in the same year Samuel Morse invented the dots and dashes code for telegraphs.) Bell wanted to take the telegraph a step further into producing sounds for vocal transmission. He began investigating how to send music instead of a Morse code text over a wire.
He entered the University College London in June 1868 but stayed only two years. Both of his brothers died of tuberculosis by 1870, and since he was sick, too, his family moved to Ontario, Canada where they thought the air was better for his health. A year later, Alexander moved to Boston where he taught at several schools for the deaf.
In 1872, he opened the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, where deaf people were taught to speak. Helen Keller was one of them later on in 1886! In 1873 at age 26, the budding inventor became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory. His experiments were done in a rented room at his boarding house, where he had to do his research at night.
Others were actively working on voice transmission at the same time around the world.
- Charles Grafton Page (Salem, Massachusetts) noticed the sound made when an electric circuit connected to a magnet was broken.
- Joseph Henry (New Jersey) wrote about making a keyboard device with a rubber membrane using electromagnets to make words on a telegraph line.
- Charles Bourseul (France) reported that flexible plates would vibrate in harmony with different air pressures and make the plates open or close an electric circuit.
- Antonio Meucci (Italy) worked with early variations of the telephone in the 1850s.
- Philipp Reis (Germany) invented a transmitter that sent audible sounds along a telegraph wire, and coined the term telephony in 1861.
- Elisha Gray teamed up with Western Union to experiment with sending tones.
Bell tinkered with a phonautograph, initially made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and later by Thomas Edison. This copied sound waves onto smoked glass or aluminum foil. Edison's foil version could even play back the recording. Bell thought multiple metal reeds would copy the voice and replay the sound instantly at the other end by bouncing it off a diaphragm instead of having to wait to play back a recording. The problem was how to amplify the current created by the voice.
But Bell needed funding because Edison and Gray were getting money from Western Bell to conduct their research. One of Bell's students, Mabel Hubbard (soon to be his wife), had a rich father, patent attorney Gardiner Hubbard, who was willing to provide capital. In 1875, his electrical parts supplier assigned Thomas Augustus Watson to assist Bell.
When Bell and Watson were adjusting reeds on their electromagnets in the lab one day, an accident caused one reed to vibrate on the transmitter, and Bell heard it coming out of the receiver. This gave him the idea that instead of a short open circuit like Morse code uses, he figured an "undulating current" (a longer connection) was what was needed to transmit sound! So, instead of using multiple reeds for each pitch, only one was needed, and he then designed his first prototype.
With this concept, at age 28 he filed for a U.S. patent on February 14, 1876, and it was issued on March 7 (four days after his 29th birthday). His application for the patent was the fifth one on that day, while a competitor with a similar design, Elisha Gray, was 39th on the same day! So, Bell edged out Gray by just a few hours to get ahead of him in line. To be fair, the patent examiner noticed both applications and confronted Bell because of the similarity in design. Fortunately, Bell explained that he had filed another design patent a year earlier using mercury instead of a conductive water solution, so he had precedence over Gray.
But he had never actually made a call with the device yet.
Three days after receiving the patent, Bell conducted the first test to send a voice message with his phone. The receiver was in another room with the door closed, and when Bell spoke into the transmitter, his assistant Thomas Watson heard him say, "Watson, come here. I want to see you." and then came to Bell to announce that he had heard and understood the call!
- June 25, 1876. At the U.S. Centennial International Exhibition, he demonstrated a working version of his telephone.
- August 3, 1876. He used existing telegraph lines to speak 6 km away (from Brantford, Ontario to Mount Pleasant) as a second test of his phone.
- August 4. His third demonstration was reading and singing between his home and a newly built telegraph line to the Dominion Telegraph Company office where his family listened in.
- August 10, 1876 was his next test. It was made between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, 13 km away, and considered by some to be the first long-distance call.
- October 9, 1876. He performed the first two-way call between Cambridge and Boston.
- January 1915. Bell performed the first transcontinental telephone call, from New York City to Watson in San Francisco, 3,400 miles away.
He started the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 and a few days later married Mabel Hubbard on July 11, 1877. Two years later, he bought the rights to use Thomas Edison's carbon microphone so users wouldn't have to shout when making calls.
Although he spent most of the rest of his life pursuing ways to help the deaf, he accomplished other technological feats.
- He built a metal detector used in President Garfield when he was shot.
- He tinkered with X-rays, discovered in 1895, and conceived of making 3D images with them, foreshadowing the CAT scan.
- Soon after the Wright brothers made their historic first flight in 1903, Bell conducted many experiments on flight himself.
- He published in 1917 about fossil fuel usage eventually creating a "hot-house" effect on Earth. In addition, he proposed using alcohol as an alternative fuel.
- He co-invented a wireless telephone called the photophone, which used sunlight to transmit voice sounds.
- He converted the Mohawk language to his father's Visible Speech and was made an honorary chief.
- Bell Labs invented the bel and decibel units of measurement of sound pressure level and named the unit after him.
Alexander Graham Bell naturalized as an American citizen in 1882 and considered himself a native son of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He died at 75 on August 2, 1922 from complications due to diabetes. At the end of his funeral, all phones in the United States were silenced for one minute in his honor.
Here's a 10-minute video on how to make a telephone similar to Bell's.
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