Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3rd March, 1847, at 16 South Charlotte Street in Edinburgh's New Town. He was the second of ultimately three sons to be born to his speech therapist father and his mother. There can therefore be little doubt where he first acquired his interest in sound and the quality of same.

The house where Bell was born (pictured right as it is today) should perhaps have become a museum but - when it was owned by British Telecom - it was their assertion that the premises were too small for such a purpose and could not be adapted to facilitate disable access. BT did, however, contribute a lot of artefacts to the Alexander Graham Bell exhibition which opened at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh, in October 2003.

Alexander Graham Bell's great-grandson, Hugh Muller (71), made the journey from Nova Scotia to Edinburgh for the opening of the exhibition. He said that his great-grandfather was always proud to be a Scot and that the award he was given of the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh on his last ever visit to Scotland was the one which he prized most.

Bell's first recognised invention was when he came up with an automatic dehusking machine for use in a mill owned by his friend's father. His creation was so successful, it was actually put in to use and retained for a number of years.

It was due to his mother's rapidly developing deafness in his early teenaged years, however, that he seriously began concentrating upon the quality of sound and communications. He devised a crude form of sign language with which he could communicate with her and also practised his diction that she may hear him if he spoke close enough to her ear.

Surprisingly, the young Alexander was neither a model nor even an enthusiastic pupil at school, actually leaving at the age of 15, much to the consternation of his father. It may well be for this reason that he subsequently moved to London to live with his grandfather and namesake.

Reluctant Genius:
Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention

Order this book from Amazon UK via the panel to the left.

After approximately a year spent in London with his grandfather, Bell returned to Scotland and to a position as a student teacher of elocution and music at Weston House Academy in Elgin, Morayshire. Teaching by day, he studied the principals of electricity in the evenings, showing a particular interest in telegraphy. It was at this time that he conducted his experiments in the pitch of vowel sounds and subsequently invented a machine to replicate them electronically. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is no monument whatsoever in Elgin to Bell once having resided there.

Then it was on to the University of Edinburgh. During this period, the young Alexander and his brother, Melville - inspired by the atomaton of Sir Charles Wheatstone - constructed a "talking head," capable of enunciating the word, "Mama."

In 1870, Alexander Graham Bell's brother, Melville, died from tuberculosis. It was a disease which Bell's father had also contracted as a young man and recuperated from in Newfoundland. As he knew that Alexander was also not in the best of health, Bell Senior sold up in Edinburgh and moved the entire family to Canada.

The family first purchased a farm in Ontario, where Bell continued his studies, but he subsequently moved to Boston in the USA and took a job teaching deaf children. He thereafter became a Professor of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech at Boston University, where he was encouraged in his continuing experimentation by a skilled electrician, Tom Watson, who provided him with numerous electrical devices to assist same.

There were two other people doing work significantly similar to Bell's. There was the German, Johann Philipp Reis, and the American, Elisha Gray. The race was therefore on to see who could make the big breakthrough first.

Incredibly, it was on the very same day, 14th February 1876, that Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed patent applications at the New York Patent Office. Bell filed his just two hours before Gray, so he was successful, though many legal challenges were made against him for almost two decades. The following month, Bell and Tom Watson held the first ever telephone conversation, in adjacent rooms, and the telephone was born. He formed The Bell Telephone Company (later A,T and T) and the first telephone to be installed was in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1877.

Bell married one of his former students, Mabel Hubbard, and the couple set off on honeymoon to Britain to promote the telephone there. He was soon making a great deal of money from his inventions but he never stopped experimenting. In 1881, he invented a probe for locating bullets in a body and in 1886 he sold his patent for making wax phonograph discs in order to fund the opening of an institute for research in to helping the deaf. In the 1890's, he conducted considerable experimentation with flying machines, earning him a place on a US Postage Stamp between the two Wright brothers.

The latter works of Alexander Graham Bell were extremely varied. He continued his experimentations in aeronautics as well as working in the development of metal detectors and automated telephone switchboards. Following the tragic death of his infant son from respiratory problems, he also developed a prototype of the iron lung.

In 1915, by way of celebrating the first transcontinental telephone link across the United States, Bell had the very first such telephone conversation with his old friend, Tom Watson.

When Alexander Graham Bell died on 22nd August 1922, the entire US telephone network was silenced for one minute in his honour.