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How Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone

These were the first words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell over the telephone to his assistant Thomas Watson, as recorded on March 10, 1876. Mahesh A Kalra traces the story of the inventor

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Alexander Graham Bell demonstrating the ability of the telephone to transmit sound via electric waves — Britannica.com; (Right) In January 1915, Bell called his assistant Watson in San Francisco from New York using a 3,400-mile-long wire, making it the first transcontinental call in the world
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‘The History of discovery is full of arrivals at right destinations using the wrong boat.’ 
– Arthur Koestler

The above saying is most apt in the case of Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish inventor from the nineteenth century credited with the invention of the telephone. Bell’s story comes across as an inspiring one, mainly because his interest in acoustic research emerged out of personal reasons (his mother and wife were deaf). But his professional commitment and zeal to develop one of the greatest inventions of the modern age is for the world to see (and hear). 

Alexander ‘Aleck’ Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847 in a family of traditional ‘elocutionists’ who not only trained generations of elocutionists but also worked on phonetics and speech disorders. Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell innovated the ‘Visible Speech’ method which involved ‘reading the lip movements of people’, in which he involved young Aleck. 

Aleck was also drawn to acoustics by his mother Eliza Bell’s deafness, which led him to experiment with sound. Encouraged by his father, young Aleck began studying acoustic resonance using simple tuning forks and was told to read the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist. However, Bell misinterpreted Helmholtz’ work’s French translation to wrongly conclude that the German had succeeded in transmitting sounds via an electric wire, which led to his continued experiments based on a ‘wrong’ premise.

The Bell family moved to Canada in 1870, relocating to Brantford, Ontario where both father and son took to teaching hearing-impaired students. Aleck went to Boston University to teach, where he was inspired to concentrate fully on his experiments, by 1873. He was supported by the families of two students, Georgie Sanders whose rich father, Thomas Sanders, provided him a place for research, and Mabel Hubbard, a bright girl whom he later married, and whose father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, backed Bell’s research financially till the very end, especially in the legal battle for his patent. 

Bell hired a professional electrical designer, Thomas Watson, as his assistant and embarked on serious research from 1874 to be in the race to develop an ‘acoustic telegraph’. In the race were more eminent researchers like Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray from the US, and Antonio Meucci and Charles Bourseul from Italy and France. In the end, the technology assimilated all their ideas in one form or another. However, during an experiment conducted on June 2, 1875, Bell told Watson to manipulate an electrical reed which was not responding to electrical current. As Watson plucked the reed, Bell clearly ‘heard’ the reed vibrate. He concluded that the reed’s sound was transmitted as it vibrated without the electricity and that he could replicate the same concept using a diaphragm akin to the human ear to receive the sound. This experiment led to the development of a rudimentary ‘acoustic telegraph’ which could transmit sound, though not words. 

Bell filed for a patent for this instrument by the end of 1875. However, there were two claims, one by Antonio Meucci, who claimed to have invented the telettrofono in 1854 and had filed for a preliminary patent in 1871. Meucci was, however, held up due to a lack of funds, leading to later claims that Bell stole his invention. The second claim was by Elisha Gray, who also filed for a preliminary patent for the acoustic telegraph on the same morning of February 14, 1876. In fact, Gray had a more practical route of transmitting the sound through a liquid transmitter. However, Bell won the patent for inventing a device for ‘transmitting vocal and other sounds telegraphically’ on March 7, 1876. Bell controversially used a liquid transmitter similar to Gray’s design during an experiment on March 10, 1876 to successfully create a practical telephone. More importantly, it was during this experiment that Bell spoke the famous sentence, “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you,” which was clearly heard by Watson at the receiving end in an adjoining room.

Soon, Bell demonstrated an improvised telephone in August 1876 using an electromagnetic transmitter to hold a telephonic conversation between his Brantford home and a telegraph office 8 km away. Bell tried to sell the patent to the telegraphy giant Western Union for $ 1,00,000, but the company’s president mocked the invention as a toy. However, Bell proved him wrong by forming the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 and further improving his invention using Edison’s carbon microphone, which reduced the need for the caller to shout. Bell and his partners became millionaires as the number of Americans owning telephones rose every year. In January 1915, Bell called Watson in San Francisco from New York using a 3,400-mile-long wire, making it the first transcontinental call in the world.

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