The Telephone Mogul

Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3rd 1847 and later adopted the middle name ‘Graham’ out of admiration for a family friend. Bell developed an interest in science from an early age although he came from a family of elocution teachers.

He made his first invention at the age of 11 with a device for cleaning wheat and graduated two years later from the Royal High School. He was mesmerised by a demonstration of Sir Charles Wheatstone’s ‘Speaking Machine’ the following year during a trip to London with his father. By the time he was 16, Bell was teaching elocution as a student teacher and spent 1864 at the University of Edinburgh before becoming an instructor in a Bath college. It was here that he turned his attention to telephony and acoustics with the aim of improving the deafness of his mother.

The Bell family moved to Canada when Alexander was 23 and his love of science continued to grow, with him designing a piano which could transmit its music over a distance by electricity. He also extended his teaching across the Atlantic, first in Montreal and then at Boston University, where Bell continued his telephony research. He had the bold and brave idea of wanting to produce a telephone which would send musical notes and articulate speech. This was unheard of at the time with communication via telegraph lines dependent on hand delivery and constraints of only one message at a time.

A chance meeting in 1874-75 between Bell and Thomas Watson was one of the most fortuitous in technological history. The two collaborated on ideas with the latter using his tool-making skills to assist the former. Watson was intrigued by the Scotsman’s vision and the partnership was formed which went onto become very successful.

The duo reached a milestone on July 2nd 1875 when by accident, Watson created a sound by untying a reed and Bell heard it in another room. He worked out that they were similar to those in a human voice and realised that his vision of sending speech over a wire was more than just a dream. Bell raced to perfect his telephone and applied for a patent with the financial backing of his future father-in-law. The patent was granted a year later and he discovered that human speech could be transmitted over a wire using conducting liquid.

The monumental day of March 10th 1876 changed the world of telecommunications forever. After Bell’s accident with the battery acid, the two had made the world’s first telephone call and made scientific history. Bell seized on the opportunity to promote his new invention and introduced the telephone to the world at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia leaving onlookers shocked. News of this (then called the ‘electrical speech machine’) spread quickly across North America and Europe. Two years later, President Rutherford B. Hayes became the first president to have the telephone installed at the White House and made his first call to Bell 13 miles away. During this time, Bell married Mabel Hubbard, set up the first telephone exchange in New Haven and formed the Bell Telephone Company with others.

In 1880, his telephone company was renamed the American Bell Telephone Company and he also patented the Photophone. The device, which enabled the transmission of sound over a beam of light, had a poor quality of communication so Bell decided not to pursue it any further. He formed the Oriental Telephone Company with Thomas Edison in 1881 and continued his inventions with that of the metal detector which was used to find the bullet in the body of U.S. President James Garfield. Alexander Graham Bell became a naturalised citizen of the USA a year later and set up long distance connections between Boston, Massachusetts and New York in the two years that followed. In 1885, the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) company was formed and managed the expanding long distance business of Bell’s firms. It eventually became the overall holding company of all his ventures and is still active today.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Bell became interested in inventing a hydrofoil boat and played a key role in the formation of the Aerial Equipment Association. He went onto create the HD-4 which had a top speed of 54mph and good stability, enabling it to set the world’s marine speed record which stood for ten years until 1929. In 1921, Bell was made chairman of the board of scientific advisors to the Eugenic Record Office and the honorary president of the second international congress of Eugenics. This backed his great belief that deaf people should integrate with society. Bell died on August 2nd 1922 aged 76 in Nova Scotia and the United States phones stilled their ringing for a silent minute in tribute to a man whose yearning to communicate had made it all possible.