A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DAlexander Graham Bell : 1847 - 1922
Born in Edinburgh, his father a teacher, the family emigrated to Canada when Alexander contracted Tuberculosis. In Boston, USA, Bell became a Professor studying speech and on June 5 1875, after experimenting with various accoustical devices, he produced the first intelligible telephonic transmission with a message to his assistant. Bell patented the telephone in 1876. It was exhibited publicly the same year at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposistion and later to Queen Victoria. The following year he established the Bell Telephone Company. In 1880 he invented the photophone and the graphophone and went on to found the journal 'Science' in 1883. After 1897 his principal interest was in aeronautics.
Alexander Graham Bell. Educationist and inventor, born in Edinburgh in 1847, the son of Alexander Melville Bell. He studied at Edinburgh and London, and worked as assistant to his father in teaching elocution (1868 - 1870). In 1870 he went to Canada, and in 1871 moved to the USA and became professor of vocal physiology at Boston (1873), devoting himself to the teaching of deaf-mutes and to spreading his father's system of "visible speech'. After experimenting with various acoustical devices he produced the first intelligible telephonic transmission with a message to his assistant on 5 June 1875, and patented the telephone in 1876. He defended the patent against Elisha Gray, and formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. In 1880 he established the Volta Laboratory, and invented the photophone (1880) and the graphophone (1887). After 1897 his principal interest was in aeronautics.
In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell comes to England for his honeymoon, but business took precedence over pleasure. He demonstrated his device to telegraph engineers, gave lectures to scientists and helds telephone conversations with divers submerged in tanks of water. He demonstrated his invention to Queen Victoria, who was much impressed. She ordered a private line to be laid between Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, and Buckingham Palace. Bell also installed a telephone in the gallery of the House of Commons.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) was a contemporary of James Clerk Maxwell, and, like Maxwell, was born in Scotland and educated in England. But while Maxwell was primarily a mathematical theoretician, Bell liked to make things. For two generations, his family had been leading authorities in elocution and speech, and, after the Bells moved to America in 1870, Graham Bell himself set up his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf, and then he became a professor of speech and vocal physiology at Boston University, where he specialized in teaching deaf-mutes to talk. In an age when the likes of Michael Faraday and Maxwell were beginning to plumb the secrets of an electronic universe, it wasn't much of a stretch for Bell to move from the mechanics of speech into the electrics of speech. As a speech therapist, he was, of course, dealing with waves, sound waves, and their reception. These waves did not travel very far, or very fast. But, he reasoned, if he could convert the sound of human speech into electrical oscillations, those sounds could be sent over wires, and then converted back into sound waves at the receiving end. He theorized that if he could find a way to make an electric current vary in intensity precisely as air varies in density during the production of sound, he could transmit speech. He had moved from speech therapy into one of the great human inventions of all time, one that would bring people together and shrink the planet itself. It wasn't long before Bell and an assistant, Thomas A. Watson, were trying to develop an apparatus for electrical transmission of the spoken word. Over a five-year period, they built a number of machines that turned words into strange noises that meant nothing. Then, one day, on March 10, 1876, when Bell was in the middle of an experiment, he overturned a jar of acid. "Mr. Watson," he said. "Come here. I want you." In a nearby room, Watson heard the words coming out of one his machines. It was Bell's voice. He raced to Bell's side, shouting, "I can hear you. I can hear the words." Bell had applied for a U.S. patent 25 days before that event, sure that his tinkering with Watson would bring eventual success. When it did, he (like many inventors) found that his patent would be contested in the federal courts for two decades, the most involved patent litigation in history. But the telephone was finally determined by the U.S. Supreme Court to be Bell's and Bell's alone. The telephone was an invention that contributed much to the development and service of radio. Radio adopted the magnetic telephone receiver as its universal earphone, and the microphone had its birth in telephony. Wires helped radio make its flight into space. And then radio returned a favor: the radio-electron tube became a key to the advance telephone engineering. Bell soon moved to Washington (possibly so that he could be closer to the battlefields where his patent war was being fought) and he continued his experiments in communication. He invented the photophone, transmission of sound on a beam of light, and the graphophone, a practical approach to sound recording. In 1877, he married one of his former students, Mabel Hubbard, whose father was the founder of the National Geographic Society. It was Bell who suggested that geography could be taught best through pictures, and he sought to promote an understanding of life in distant lands at a time when travel was limited to the privileged few. Under his future son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, Bell's vision became the National Geographic Magazine. At the turn of the century, Bell became interested in a host of other endeavors. He experimented with giant, man-carrying kites, with sonar detection, solar distillation, the tetrahedron as a structural unit, and the hydrofoil boat. The year Bell died, in 1922, there were more than 14 million telephones in the U.S. There are now twice that many in California alone.
Alexander Graham Bell (b. March 3, 1847, Edinburgh--d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Can.), Scottish-born American audiologist best known as the inventor of the telephone (1876). For two generations his family had been recognized as leading authorities in elocution and speech correction, with Alexander Melville Bell's Standard Elocutionist passing through nearly 200 editions in English. Young Bell and his two brothers were trained to continue the family profession. His early achievements on behalf of the deaf and his invention of the telephone before his 30th birthday bear testimony to the thoroughness of his training. Alexander ("Graham" was not added until he was 11) was the second of the three sons of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell. Apart from one year at a private school, two years at Edinburgh's Royal High School (from which he was graduated at 14), and attendance at a few lectures at Edinburgh University and at University College in London, Bell was largely family trained and self-taught. His first professional post was at Mr. Skinner's school in Elgin, County Moray, where he instructed the children in both music and elocution. In 1864 he became a resident master in Elgin's Weston House Academy, where he conducted his first studies in sound. Appropriately, Bell had begun professionally as he would continue through life--as a teacher-scientist. In 1868 he became his father's assistant in London and assumed full charge while the senior Bell lectured in America. The shock of the sudden death of his older brother from tuberculosis, which had also struck down his younger brother, and the strain of his professional duties soon took their toll on young Bell. Concern for their only surviving son prompted the family's move to Canada in August 1870, where, after settling near Brantford, Ont., Bell's health rapidly improved. In 1871 Bell spent several weeks in Boston, lecturing and demonstrating the system of his father's Visible Speech, published in 1866, as a means of teaching speech to the deaf. Each phonetic symbol indicated a definite position of the organs of speech such as lips, tongue, and soft palate and could be used by the deaf to imitate the sounds of speech in the usual way. Young A. Graham Bell, as he now preferred to be known, showed, using his father's system, that speech could be taught to the deaf. His astounding results soon led to further invitations to lecture. Even while vacationing at his parents' home Bell continued his experiments with sound. In 1872 he opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf, edited his pamphlet Visible Speech Pioneer, and continued to study and tutor; in 1873 he became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. Never adept with his hands, Bell had the good fortune to discover and inspire Thomas Watson, a young repair mechanic and model maker, who assisted him enthusiastically in devising an apparatus for transmitting sound by electricity. Their long nightly sessions began to produce tangible results. The fathers of George Sanders and Mabel Hubbard, two deaf students whom he helped, were sufficiently impressed with the young teacher to assist him financially in his scientific pursuits. Nevertheless, during normal working hours Bell and Watson were still obliged to fulfill a busy schedule of professional demands. It is scarcely surprising that Bell's health again suffered. On April 6, 1875, he was granted the patent for his multiple telegraph; but after another exhausting six months of long nightly sessions in the workshop, while maintaining his daily professional schedule, Bell had to return to his parents' home in Canada to recuperate. In September 1875 he began to write the specifications for the telephone. On March 7, 1876, the United States Patent Office granted to Bell Patent Number 174,465 covering "The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds." Within a year followed the commercial application and, a few months later, the first of hundreds of legal suits. Ironically, the telephone--until then all too often regarded as a joke and its creator-prophet as, at best, an eccentric--was the subject of the most involved patent litigation in history. The two most celebrated of the early actions were the Dowd and Drawbaugh cases wherein the fledgling Bell Telephone Company successfully challenged two subsidiaries of the giant Western Union Telegraph Company for patent infringement. The charges and accusations were especially painful to Bell's Scottish integrity, but the outcome of all the litigation, which persisted throughout the life of his patents, was that Bell's claims were upheld as the first to conceive and apply the undulatory current. In 1877 Bell married Mabel Hubbard, 10 years his junior. The Bell story does not end with the invention of the telephone; indeed, in many ways it was a beginning. A resident of Washington, D.C., Bell continued his experiments in communication, which culminated in the invention of the photophone--transmission of sound on a beam of light; in medical research; and in techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. In 1880 France honoured Bell with the Volta Prize; and the 50,000 francs (roughly equivalent to U.S. $10,000) financed the Volta Laboratory, where, in association with Charles Sumner Tainter and his cousin, Chichester A. Bell, Bell invented the Graphophone. Employing an engraving stylus, controllable speeds, and wax cylinders and disks, the Graphophone presented a practical approach to sound recording. Bell's share of the royalties financed the Volta Bureau and the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (since 1956 the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf). May 8, 1893, was one of Bell's happiest days; his 13-year-old prodigy, Helen Keller, participated in the ground-breaking ceremonies for the new Volta Bureau building--today an international information centre relating to the oral education of the deaf. In 1885 Bell acquired land on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. There, in surroundings reminiscent of his early years in Scotland, he established a summer home, Beinn Bhreagh, complete with research laboratories. In 1898 Bell succeeded his father-in-law as president of the National Geographic Society. Convinced that geography could be taught through pictures, he sought to promote an understanding of life in distant lands in an age when travel was limited to a privileged few. Again he found the proper hands, Gilbert Grosvenor, his future son-in-law, who transformed a modest pamphlet into a unique educational journal reaching millions throughout the world. As interest in the possibility of flight increased after the turn of the century, he experimented with giant man-carrying kites. Characteristically, Bell again found a group of four willing young enthusiasts to execute his theories. Always an inspiration, Mabel Hubbard Bell, wishing to maintain the stimulating influence of the group, soon founded the Aerial Experiment Association, the first research organization established and endowed by a woman. Deafness was no handicap to the wife of Professor Bell. At Beinn Bhreagh, Bell entered new subjects of investigation, such as sonar detection, solar distillation, the tetrahedron as a structural unit, and hydrofoil craft, one of which weighed more than 10,000 pounds and attained a speed record of 70 miles per hour in 1919. Apart from his lifelong association with the cause of the deaf, Bell never lingered on one project. His research interests centred on basic principles rather than on refinements. The most cursory examination of his many notebooks shows marginal memos and jottings, often totally unrelated to the subject at hand--reminders of questions and ideas he wanted to investigate. It was impossible for him to carry each of his creative ideas through to a practical end. Many of his conceptions are only today seeing fruition; indeed, some undoubtedly have yet to be developed. The range of his inventive genius is represented only in part by the 18 patents granted in his name alone and the 12 he shared with his collaborators. These included 14 for the telephone and telegraph, 4 for the photophone, 1 for the phonograph, 5 for aerial vehicles, 4 for hydroairplanes, and 2 for a selenium cell. Until a few days before his death Bell continued to make entries in his journal. During his last dictation he was reassured with "Don't hurry," to which he replied, "I have to." (T.K.B.)
Two general biographies are R.V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (1973), the best account of Bell and his work; and Catherine MacKenzie, Alexander Graham Bell (1928). The most detailed published account of Bell's telephonic work is his own last deposition (1892), published in 1908 by American Bell Telephone, The Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell; the original patents of 1876 and 1877 are printed in full. Thomas B. Costain, Chord of Steel (1960), is limited largely to the telephone.
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