sign in sign up
<<
Home , 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray

An Inventive People

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in , Scotland. His mother was nearly deaf, while his father was a teacher to the deaf. At age eleven, Bell entered the Royal High School in Edinburgh but left four years later before completing his degree. His family relocated three years later to , where he eventually entered University College in 1868. In 1870, Bell and his family moved yet again, this time to Canada after the death of two of his brothers. Bell, independent of his family, moved to Boston the following year. Once there, he began working at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes as a teacher, and he later taught at the Clarke School for the Deaf and the American School for the Deaf. Concurrent with his teaching, Bell began to design new ways of transmitting telegraph messages. At the time, two messages could be transmitted successfully on a single telegraph line. Thomas Alva Edison, backed by , later expanded this to four messages per line. Alexander Graham Bell helped develop the harmonic telegraph that could transmit as many as ten messages per line. However, the technology proved less functional in practice than in a lab. Bell’s work with attracted investors, though Bell’s interest in transmitting signals began to take a back seat to his desire to transmit voices. He submitted his patent for the on , 1876, just hours before Elisha , one of his greatest competitors, submitted his own patent for a similar device. Bell was ultimately granted the patent over Gray, and on , 1876, he successfully made the first , which was to his assistant in another room, saying, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” By August, Bell’s telephone was able to successfully transmit its first long- distance call. The Bell was established in July 1877, and Alexander Graham Bell served as a technology adviser. Bell’s interest in , much like his earlier interest in telegraphs, began to wane, and the inventor sold the majority of his shares in the company by the late 1880s. Bell dedicated his remaining years to perfecting the , investigating ways to use to transmit sounds, inventing new medical and surgical technologies, and studying aircraft design. He was also a founding member of the Society.

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison, frequently remembered as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was born in 1877 in Milan, . The youngest of seven children, Edison left school at age twelve to begin working on a railroad in Michigan. It was during this time that he was exposed to telegraphy. He would later travel around the country as a telegrapher during the Civil War. Compelled by his own hearing loss, Edison looked for ways to make operating telegraph machines easier for the hearing impaired. Edison left telegraphy and became a full-time inventor in 1869. He set up shop in Newark, , where he worked for five years before building a lab in Menlo Park. During this time, Edison dedicated significant amounts of time to creating new telegraphy products for companies, such as Western Union. In 1877, Edison’s meticulous mind helped improve the telephone, and he also invented the phonograph.

1 In 1878 Edison’s focus turned to developing an . Backed by J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family, Edison established the Edison Electric Company and toiled for two years before discovering a filament that would sustain an electric current in 1880. Within a year, Edison’s bulbs were being used at major international events, including the Lighting Expedition. The Edison Electric Company later became the General Electric Company in 1892 after its merger with a competing electric company. Edison continued to invent through the remainder of his life, developing the first motion picture camera (the Kinetograph) and a complementary viewing device (the Kinetoscope), as well as an alkaline storage battery and a battery used in Ford’s Model T.

2