Alexander Graham Bell

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WEEK 2 LEVEL 7

Alexander Graham Bell is the famous inventor of the telephone. Born in Scotland on March 3, 1847, he was the second son of Alexander and Eliza Bell. His father taught students the art of speaking clearly, or elocution, and his mother played the piano. Bell’s mother was almost deaf. His father’s career and his mother’s hearing impairment influenced the course of his career. He became a teacher of deaf people.

As a child, Bell didn’t care for school, and he eventually dropped out. He did like to solve problems though. For example, when he was only 12, he invented a new farm implement. The tool removed the tiny husks from wheat grains.

After the deaths of his two brothers from tuberculosis, Bell and his parents moved from Europe to Canada in 1870. They thought the climate there was healthier than in Scotland. A year later, Bell moved to the United States. He got a job teaching at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes.

One of his students was a 15-year-old named Mabel Hubbard. He was 10 years older than she was, but they fell in love and married in 1877. The Bells raised two daughters but lost two sons who both died as babies.

Bell’s father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, knew Bell was interested in inventing things, so he asked him to improve the telegraph. Telegraph messages were tapped out with a machine using dots and dashes known as Morse code. The receiver of the message had to translate the sets of dots and dashes into letters and words. Bell researched methods to transmit several telegraph messages over a single wire.

Bell also wanted to work on a machine that would transmit the human voice, so that people could speak to each other over distances. He obtained funding for the machine he called the telephone, but he also agreed to spend time improving the telegraph.

He knew that to send sounds across a wire he had to somehow change the electrical current. To do this, he made a needle vibrate in water. The change in current was what transmitted, or sent, the sound. His idea worked. On March 7, 1876, Bell obtained a patent on the device. The patent meant that no one else could copy his invention. Then, just a few days later, he made his first successful telephone call. His assistant, Thomas Watson, was in another room listening on a second device. He was the first to hear Bell’s famous words over the telephone wire: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”

In August that same year, Bell set up a demonstration of his telephone using two telegraph offices. Instead of only being a room away, the offices were five miles apart. Bell made the world's first long-distance

phone call in front of an amazed audience. Once it had been demonstrated that his invention would work, Bell and his investment partners offered to sell the patent to Western Union. They refused the offer. The company felt the telephone was little more than a toy.

This development turned out fortunately for Bell and his investors, who then formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. The founders became very wealthy, as the telephone became one of the most successful products ever. In January, 1915 Bell was invited to make the first ceremonial transcontinental telephone call. From New York, he called his associate Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

Although he is most famous for his work on the telephone, Bell devised various other inventions in communications, sound and audio, and aeronautics. He invented the audiometer (which measures hearing), the microphone, and early versions of a metal detector. He worked on improvements and designs for practical hydrofoil watercraft. He made great improvements to Thomas Edison’s invention, the phonograph or record player, earning another patent. In all, Bell held more than 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators. He considered his greatest invention a wireless telephone, named a photophone, which allowed for the transmission of both sound and human conversations on a beam of light. The photophone was the precursor to fiber-optic communication systems, which finally put the photophone’s principles into popular use decades later.

Bell was a very talented scientist and inventor and sought to foster the advancement of scientific knowledge throughout his life.