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Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today
as the inventor of the telephone, but he was also an outstanding teacher of the
deaf and a prolific inventor of other devices. Bell was born in Edinburgh,
Scotland, to a family of speech educators. His father, Melville Bell, had
invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used
in teaching deaf people to speak. Aleck Bell studied at Edinburgh University in
1864 and assisted his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During
these years he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics
of speech, inspired in part by the acoustic experiments of German physicist
Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894), which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing
speech. When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, Melville Bell took
his remaining family to the healthier climate of Canada in 1870. From there,
Aleck Bell journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1871 and joined the staff of
the Boston School for the Deaf.
The following year, Bell opened his own school
in Boston for training teachers of the deaf; in 1873 he became a professor of
vocal physiology at Boston University, and he also tutored private pupils.
Bell's interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the
transmission of sound over wires. In particular, he experimented with
development of the harmonic telegraph --a device that could send multiple
messages at the same time over a single wire. Bell also worked with the
possibility of transmitting the human voice, experimenting with vibrating
membranes and an actual human ear. Gardiner Hubbard (1822-1897) and Thomas
Sanders, fathers of two of his deaf pupils backed Bell financially in his
investigations. Early in 1874, Bell met Thomas A. Watson (1854-1934), a young
machinist at a Boston electrical shop. Watson became Bell's indispensable
assistant, bringing to Bell's experiments the crucial ingredient that had been
lacking--his technical expertise in electrical engineering. Together the two men
spent endless hours experimenting. Although Bell formed the basic concept of the
telephone--using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the varying
sound waves of human speech--in the summer of 1874, Hubbard insisted that the
young inventor focus his efforts on the harmonic telegraph instead. Bell
complied, but when he patented one of his telegraph designs in February 1875, he
found that Elisha Gray had patented a multiple telegraph two days earlier.
Greatly discouraged, Bell consulted in Washington with the elderly Joseph Henry,
who urged Bell to pursue his germ of a great invention --speech transmission.
Back in Boston, Bell and Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph, but
still with the telephone in mind. By accident on a June day in 1875, an
intermittent transmitter produced a steady current and transmitted sound. Bell
had proof of his 1874 idea; he quickly sketched a design for an electric
telephone, and Watson built it. The partners experimented all summer, but failed
actually to transmit voice sounds. That fall, Bell began to write the patent
specifications, but delayed application; Hubbard finally filed for the patent on
February 14, 1876, just hours before Gray appeared at the same patent office to
file an intent to patent his telephone design.
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