Alexander Graham Bell

Scottish American inventor

• Born: March 3, 1847
• Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: August 2, 1922
• Place of death: Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada

One of the major inventive geniuses of modern times, Bell created and perfected the telephone and greatly advanced the teaching of the deaf.

Early Life

The second of three boys, Alexander Graham Bell was born into a Scottish family prominent in the field of elocution. Both his grandfather Alexander Bell and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught the subject. The former invented a technique to check stammering, while the latter became a major innovator and author in corrective speech. His mother, Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, a portrait painter and musician, educated her son until his tenth year. After three years of formal schooling, he spent a year in London with his grandfather, who inspired the young Bell with his deep commitment to the study of the science of sound. Bell then taught music and elocution as a student teacher in Elgin, in the midst of which he spent a year at the University of Edinburgh. During 1866-1867, he taught at a college in Bath, England. Thus, he was largely family-taught and self-taught; his black, penetrating eyes and intense, though modest, manner attested his inquiring mind.

Life’s Work

Bell’s genius had begun to reveal itself in 1864, when, at the age of seventeen, he undertook his first experiments in the science of sound, followed the next year by initial work in the application of electricity to transmitting speech via sound waves. Upon the death of his grandfather, Bell’s father replaced the former in London and published his major tract Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics in 1867, the year that young Alexander became his assistant. From his father, Bell had inherited the notion of visible speech—that is, a visual-symbolic alphabet for use in producing spoken sounds—and therefore also his father’s dedication to improving methods for teaching the deaf to talk. During 1868-1870, father and son established an equal partnership, even as Bell studied anatomy and physiology at University College, London, and applied his father’s techniques of visible speech at a school for the deaf at Kensington.

Such a heavy work load began to undermine Bell’s health, alarming his parents, inasmuch as they had recently lost both their other sons to tuberculosis. In 1870, they emigrated to Canada, settling in the countryside near Brantford, Ontario. There, Bell’s health was quickly restored, and he resumed his work in Boston, tutoring and teaching at schools for the deaf, opening his own school for other teachers, continuing his experiments in sound, and making an improvement in the system of visible speech that has remained a standard technique ever since. He also invented an audiometer. Formal recognition came early in 1873 when Boston University made him professor of vocal physiology and the mechanics of speech, a post he held for four years.

During 1873-1876, Bell brought together his disparate studies of the science of sound and its electrical telegraphic transmission. Ever since his first experiments with the latter in 1865, Bell spent whatever spare time he had in attempting to invent a device by which oral sounds could be transmitted via electrical wires: the telephone. Concurrently, he studied the human ear to discover the importance of the membrane for such a device, and he learned to transmit multiple electrical messages over a single wire. In applying the key element of acoustics to telegraphy, Bell sought and received the counsel and encouragement of the venerable experimental physicistJoseph Henry, who had worked along similar lines.

Basically a scientist, Bell was fortunate to hire as his technical assistant Thomas A. Watson, an adept mechanic who shared his long nights of experiments on electrical sound transmission. Unable to fund this work himself, Bell found two patrons in the fathers of deaf children he was teaching. These men were Thomas Sanders and Gardiner G. Hubbard. Only rest, however, could restore Bell’s physical strength from occasional fatigue resulting from these considerable labors, and Bell obtained it at his parents’ home in Canada.

The first, though unintelligible, human sounds, Bell’s to Watson, came through their wire in June, 1875, but it was not until the following March 10 that a twenty-foot-long wire carried the monumental, though unanticipated, first message: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you.” The two men rapidly improved their invention, and Bell astounded the scientific world with his first public demonstration of the telephone at the International Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in June, 1876. The following spring, he demonstrated the first long-distance telephone conversation, between Boston and New York.

In July, 1877, Bell, Hubbard, and Sanders created the Bell Telephone Company. Having patented all the related inventions, Bell finally began to enjoy the resulting financial rewards, although some six hundred lawsuits ensued, with rivals claiming credit—until 1888, when the Supreme Court ruled in Bell’s favor as sole inventor of the telephone.

Though his fame was assured through his epic creation, Bell remained equally dedicated to the education of the deaf, especially after he married Hubbard’s daughter Mabel, one of his deaf students, in July, 1877. She became an important source of encouragement and inspiration for the rest of his life and gave him two daughters. During their subsequent trip to Europe, where he introduced the telephone, Bell lectured on the teaching of the deaf at Oxford University. After settling in Washington in 1878, Bell enlarged his study of the physical nature of deafness and in 1880 founded the Volta Laboratory upon receiving the French Volta Prize of fifty thousands francs (about ten thousand dollars).

Bell used the Volta Laboratory in the spirit of scientific philanthropy; instead of patenting new discoveries made there, he allowed their general use for the public good. Most important were the photophone to send words by light ray and an induction balance or electric probe to locate metal objects in the human body, the latter first used to find the assassin’s bullet that mortally wounded President James A. Garfield.

Bell became an American citizen in 1882 and soon thereafter built a summer home and research laboratory at Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Among many honors he received from European countries was a Ph.D., awarded by the University of Würzburg in Bavaria.

Bell’s restless, inquisitive mind seemed to accelerate as he grew older, and his black hair, beard, and sideburns turned a striking, billowy white. At the Volta Laboratory, he improved upon Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph during the mid-1880’s; proceeds from the sale of some of the patents were used to transform the Laboratory into the Volta Bureau for the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge Relating to the Deaf. His prize pupil the next decade became Helen Keller .

In 1890, Bell founded and became first president of the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (renamed the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf in 1956). An early study of marriage among the deaf led into eugenics and the problems of longevity, research that emerged as a major book in 1918. He also supported Albert A. Michelson’s first measurements of the speed of light. Bell continued to improve upon the telephone, and he and Watson inaugurated the first transcontinental phone call when, in 1915, they conversed between San Francisco and New York.

The possibilities of manned powered flight held the greatest fascination for Bell from before 1891, when he supported the pioneering work of Samuel P. Langley, until the end of his life. Bell believed that tetrahedron-shaped cells could be joined for lift, and experimented with them in immense kites. During 1907-1909, he teamed up with aviation pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss and three other young men in the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), the brainstorm of his wife, who also funded its work. Among the aircraft the five men created at Bell’s Nova Scotia laboratory and Curtiss’s facility at Hammondsport, New York, was Bell’s own tetrahedral plane. Though it finally flew in 1912, it proved too unwieldy, but where the tetrahedron failed as an aeronautical device, it eventually proved highly successful in architecture (as, for example, in R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome).

In 1916, Bell advocated American preparedness in military air power, and inasmuch as the AEA operated their craft from the water and the ice, Bell during and after World War I developed a high-speed hydrofoil motorboat for riding above the water at speeds of up to seventy miles per hour.

At his Nova Scotia laboratory and in Washington, Bell carried on his manifold experiments, which also included a home air-cooling unit, an artificial respirator, the breeding of sheep, improved methods of lithography and sonar detection, and a vertical-propelled, aircraft-type engine that anticipated the helicopter and jet propulsion. His extensive notebooks were filled with other ideas that he never had time to develop; he was working on a means to distill saltwater when he died. His chief fame, however, rests on the invention of the telephone, of which thirteen million existed worldwide at the time of his death on August 2, 1922. Two days later, on the day of his funeral, all telephones in the United States and Canada fell silent for one minute in tribute to him.

Significance

Alexander Graham Bell typified the remarkable generation of American inventor-scientists of the late nineteenth century whose ability to apply scientific discoveries to everyday practical technological uses played a major part in the rise of contemporary urban civilization. Driven by an insatiable curiosity and endowed with sheer experimental (though not theoretical) genius—and perfect pitch—Bell was able to focus his many interests on two or three projects simultaneously, often complementing one another. Thus, his humanitarian work on helping the deaf to learn to speak was wedded early to his efforts to invent the practical telephone. He never lost interest in either project, although aviation commanded equal attention the second half of his life. This was a fascination shared by many prominent peers in the scientific and technological worlds, among them, for example, explorer Robert Edwin Peary, yacht designer W. Starling Burgess, and naval inventor Bradley A. Fiske.

An immensely generous person, Bell was completely selfless in his devotion to the deaf, to whose improvement he committed many of the profits from the telephone. Because he championed the diffusion of scientific knowledge, he became a major catalyst in the cause of popular science. With Hubbard, in 1883, he founded and operated for eleven years Science magazine, subsequently taken over by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1888, Bell was a founder of the National Geographic Society , ten years later succeeding Hubbard as its president, until 1904. Under his presidency, in 1899, the National Geographic magazine began publication. One of his daughters married the editor Gilbert H. Grosvenor; Bell’s grandson, Melville Bell Grosvenor, succeeded to the editorship half a century later. In 1891, Bell funded the creation of the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution and seven years after that became a regent of the Smithsonian, a post he held the rest of his life. Largely through Bell’s efforts, the remains of James Smithson were returned from Genoa, Italy, to Washington, D.C., in 1904.

Like other major inventors of his day, Bell had to protect his patents from challengers, and did so by keeping copious notes and having numerous photographs taken. His love of nature was embodied in his summer home and laboratory, named Beinn Bhreagh, the commanding view of the Bras d’Or Lakes in this “New Scotland” (Nova Scotia) reminding him of his native land. Such an idyllic environment proved especially conducive to his experiments over the last thirty-five years of his life. There he died, and there—in a mountainside—he was buried. He had shared the wonders of nature with the world at large through the pages of the National Geographic. The full legacy of Alexander Graham Bell is beyond measure.

Bibliography

Bruce, Robert V. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. The standard biography, this heavily annotated work focuses on the development of the telephone but offers a good general treatment of Bell’s life before and after its invention.

Casey, Louis S. Curtiss: The Hammondsport Era, 1907-1915. New York: Crown, 1981. Though a biography of pioneer aviator and manufacturer Glenn H. Curtiss in his early years of aviation, the book discusses Bell’s role in the AEA, utilizing among its sources the AEA Bulletin.

Costain, Thomas B. Chord of Steel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. A popular account of the invention of the telephone.

Grosvenor, Edwin S., and Morgan Wesson. Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. A biography of Bell, focusing on the early history of the telephone, enlivened by more than four hundred color and black-and-white illustrations.

Mackay, James. Alexander Graham Bell: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Mackay depicts Bell as a man of great intelligence and curiosity, and describes his varied interests and inventions. Provides new information on Bell’s early years and how these years influenced his later life.

Mackenzie, Catherine Dunlap. Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. This early biography is a sound though dated work.

Parkin, J. H. Bell and Baldwin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. Centers on the association of Bell with the Canadian F. W. “Casey” Baldwin during the AEA period with Glenn Curtiss.

Waite, Helen E. Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia: MacRae Smith, 1961. A moving account of the relationship between Bell and his wife, who, though twelve years his junior, emerges as a key figure in her own right and proof positive of Bell’s success in overcoming the disability of deafness. She died in 1923.

Watson, Thomas A. Exploring Life. New York: D. Appleton, 1926. This autobiography by Bell’s main assistant (1854-1934) illuminates the great inventor’s character and methods.