Bell, Alexander Graham

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American Inventor
1847–1922

Alexander Graham Bell, best known as the inventor of the telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. When he died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada, on August 2, 1922, he was considered one of the most successful inventors of his time.

Bell's interest in communication was stimulated by unique family circumstances. Both his grandfather and father were accomplished speech experts. Many believe Bell's father was the inspiration for Professor HenryHiggins in the 1964 movie My Fair Lady. Having a hearing-impaired mother also made Bell conscious of the challenges of being deaf. In 1868 he began using his father's models of visible speech to teach deaf students phonetics, a career he resumed after emigrating with his family from Scotland to Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in 1870.

The following year he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and taught at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes (later called the Horace Mann School). Teaching private students supplemented his income. One of these hearing-impaired students, Mabel Hubbard, later became his wife. Bell's passion for helping the disabled, particularly the sight- and hearing-impaired, remained with him throughout his life.

Although Bell experimented throughout his childhood, it was not until he moved to Boston that his interests in inventing became serious. There he decided to work on developing the multiple telegraph, which would allowseveral telegraphs to be sent over the same line simultaneously instead of one at a time. He received that patent in 1875. He also became fascinated with the concept of sending varying pitches, mimicking the human voice, over a wire via undulating electrical impulses, then reconstructing the pitches at the other end of the wire. After years of experimenting, he and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, met with success. Bell's patent application for the telephone was submitted only hours before a rival, Elisha Gray, submitted his version.

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In July 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was founded. The shares were divided between Bell, Watson, and two other men. As a wedding gift, Bell gave his wife, Mabel, 5,015 shares of Bell Telephone Company, keeping only ten shares for himself. Bell Telephone rapidly expanded throughout the world. While these shares provided Bell with financial security, they made his wife quite wealthy. During Bell's lifetime, Mabel repeatedly provided grants to fund his research.

The photophone, which Bell invented in 1880, worked like a telephone but used light beams instead of wire. Bell considered it one of his greatest inventions. Although the photophone's success was limited because of the lack of technology at that time, Bell's invention used the same principles as modern fiber optic telecommunications.

While living in Mabel's hometown of Washington, D.C. in 1882, Bell became an American citizen. Later he built a second home in Baddeck and called it Beinn Bhreagh. Much of his inventing was completed there.

After winning the Volta prize of France for the telephone, Bell invested the award money in the creation of the Volta Labs at Beinn Bhreagh. This lab produced the flat-disk record and a floating stylus to improve upon Thomas Edison's phonograph. With earnings from those patents, Bell established the Volta Bureau in 1908, which was dedicated to advancing knowledge of the deaf. He also established the American Association for the Promotion of the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf and continued being instrumental in assisting many deaf children, including Helen Keller, to overcome their disabilities.

Bell also became interested in screening children for hearing impairment. After developing the audiometer, he was honored for his accomplishments in that field with the term used for measuring the level of audible sound: the decibel.

Bell's interests were not confined to matters of speech. His father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a founding member and the first president of the National Geographic Society. When Hubbard died in 1897, Bell accepted the presidency of the society. He then underwrote the hiring of his future son-in-law to edit the association's monthly publication. Bell influenced many trademark features of the society, including the formation of grants for research expeditions. He also encouraged the inclusion of dynamic multiple-color photographs in National Geographic Magazine.

Bell also nurtured a fascination with flight. At Beinn Bhreagh, he experimented with kites and eventually developed and patented the tetrahedron, a four-sided triangle used in his aerial experiments. With Mabel's sponsorship, he formed the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) with four other men. From 1908 to 1909, after the Wright Brothers flew the firstairplane, Bell and his associates built four airplanes. With those machines, the AEA gained patents for improving airplane designs. The AEA then sought to build a craft that could take off and land on water. In 1918 this led to the patent for the fastest watercraft of its time, the hydrofoil HD4, which reached speeds of 114 kilometers (71 miles) per hour.

In tribute to Bell's life and accomplishments, telephones across the United States were silenced for one minute during his funeral in Baddeck in 1922.

Mary McIver Puthawala

Bell Labs; Internet; Telecommunications.

Bruce, Robert V. Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Matthews, Tom L. Always Inventing. Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1999.

Pasachoff, Naomi. Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections. Oxford: Oxford Press, 1996.

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