Alexander Graham Bell, Who Sparked a New Era of Communication
On March 10, 1876, Professor Alexander Graham Bell stood in a Boston boarding house holding a receiving device connected to a series of wires that ran into an adjacent room. There, his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, waited patiently, clutching another receiver to his ear.
Bell spoke into his end of the contraption, and Watson heard his voice in the receiver: “Mr. Watson! Come here! I want—!”
Watson dashed into the adjoining room gasping: “I heard you! I heard you!”
From that experiment using just a few feet of wire would grow an industry that would transform the world. Through the likes of the American Bell Telephone Company and its successor, AT&T (known colloquially as Ma Bell), what was once Bell’s “toy” became a communications goliath made up of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure carrying tens of millions of calls every day.
Alexander Graham Bell — who died at 75 on this day in 1922 at his estate in Nova Scotia in Canada — was fascinated by speech, sound and communication from a very young age. He was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, who was deaf. He was homeschooled by his father, a phoneticist and the developer of Visible Speech, a series of symbols designed to aid the deaf in oration
Bell moved to Boston in the early 1870s and there used methods that he had learned from his father to teach deaf students. His techniques proved so useful that he eventually taught them to others as a professor at the Boston University School of Oratory.
During these years he continued his research into sound at the university, experimenting with electricity. He hired Watson, an electrical designer and mechanic, for his electrical expertise. Soon they were collaborating on acoustic telegraphy, hoping to transmit a human voice by means of pulses along a telegraph wire.
Bell was granted a patent for the telephone — No. 174,465 — on March 7, 1876. An “Improvement in Telegraphy,” the documents stated. The patent, however, proved controversial from the start.
Even though Bell is known as the father of telephony, his claim as its inventor has been challenged repeatedly in hundreds of legal cases, some of which have appeared before the United States Supreme Court. Throughout, though, Bell’s patent was upheld.
“I may perhaps take credit for having blazed a trail for others who came after me,” Bell, who was humble by nature, once said, “but when I look at the phenomenal developments of the telephone and at the great system that bears my name, I feel that the credit for these developments is due to others rather than myself.”
He would go on to undertake important work in fields such as hydrofoils and aeronautics; make early advances in the creation of the metal detector; and develop a wireless telephone, called the photophone.
Summarizing the part Bell had played in the building of an increasingly interconnected society, The New York Times in 1947, to signify the 100th anniversary of Bell’s birth, asked readers to jump back and put themselves in the shoes of a mid-1800s parent encouraging a child to imagine the possibilities that might lie ahead.
“If in the middle of the last century,” The Times said, “our fathers had read to their children a tale about a charming princess who summoned an equally charming prince to her rescue over a copper wire with the aid of some wonderful lamps in which magical filaments glowed, there would have been cries of admiration. Well, fairy tales have a way of coming true in science and invention. And Bell’s telephone is one of them.”