The Biography of Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Remarkably, he only worked on his
invention because he misunderstood a technical work he had read in German. His
misunderstanding ultimately led to his discovery of how speech could be transmitted
electrically.
Alexander Graham Bell’s Early Life, Early Inventions, and Education

Alexander Graham Bell was born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. His mother’s
name was Eliza Grace Symonds.His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a professor of
speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh. His father also wrote definitive books
about speech and elocution, which sold very well in the UK and North America.

The young Alexander was home-schooled until he was 11, following which he attended
Edinburgh’s Royal High School for four years: he enjoyed science, but did not do well
academically. Although his schoolwork was poor, his mind was very active. One day, he
was playing at a flour mill owned by the family of a young friend. Bell learned that de-
husking the wheat grains took a lot of effort and was also very boring. He saw that it would
be possible for a machine to do the work, so he built one. He was only 12 at the time. The
machine he built was used at the mill for several years.

Aged 15, he joined his grandfather who had moved to London, England. His grandfather
home-schooled him, which seemed to bring out the best in Bell again. When he was 16,
he enrolled at Weston House Academy in Elgin, Scotland, where he learned Greek and
Latin and also earned some money teaching elocution.

While he was 16, he and his brother tried to build a talking robot. They built a windpipe
and a realistic looking head. When they blew air through the windpipe, the mouth could
make a small number of recognizable words. For the next few years, Bell moved to a new
school most years, either teaching elocution or improving his own education.
To Canada

While Bell moved around a lot, he continued to carry out his own research into sound and
speech. He worked very hard indeed, and by the time he was 20 he was in very poor
health and returned to his family home, which was now in London.

By mid-1870, when Bell was 23, both of his younger brothers had died of tuberculosis.
Bell’s parents were terrified that Alexander, whose health was fragile, would suffer a
similar fate. He was now their only surviving child. Bell’s father had gone to Canada when
he was younger and found that his poor health had improved dramatically. He now
decided that what was left of his family should move to Canada, and by late 1870, they
were living in Brantford, Ontario. Thankfully, Alexander Graham Bell’s health began to
improve. While living in Brentford, Bell learned the Mohawk language and put it in writing
for the first time. The Mohawk people made him an Honorary Chief.
And the United States

When he was 25, Bell opened his School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech
in Boston, MA, where he taught deaf people to speak. At age 26, although he did not
have a university degree, he became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the
Boston University School of Oratory.
The Invention of the Telephone

While he was moving jobs and locations around the UK and North America, Bell had
developed an overriding desire to invent a machine that could reproduce human speech.
Speech had become his life: his mother had gone deaf, and Bell’s father had developed
a method of teaching deaf people to speak, which Bell also taught. His research into
mechanizing human speech had become a relentless obsession: in the UK it had driven
him almost to collapse.

When Bell was only 19 years old, he had described his work in a letter to the linguistics
expert Alexander Ellis. Ellis told Bell his work was similar to work carried out in Germany
by Hermann von Helmholtz.
A Mistake Puts Bell on the Right Track
Bell eagerly read Helmholtz’s work, or tried to read it. It was in German, which he did not
understand. Instead, he tried to follow the logic of the book’s diagrams. Bell
misunderstood the diagrams, believing that Helmholtz had been able to convert all of the
sounds of speech to electricity.In fact, Helmholtz had not been able to do this – he had
only succeeded with vowel sounds – but from then on, Bell believed it could be done!

Aged 23, Bell built a workshop in the new family home in Ontario and experimented there
with converting music into an electrical signal. In Boston, aged 25, Bell continued his
experiments through the night while working in the day. In summer, he would return to his
workshop in Ontario and continue his experiments.
Financial Backing for a Voice Telegraph

In 1874 Bell was 26. The first electrical telegraph lines had been built forty years earlier,
in the 1830s. These allowed electrical clicks (Morse code) to be instantly transmitted over
great distances. Bell wanted to transmit human speech instead of clicks, and he was
getting close to doing it. He had found that human speech came in wave like patterns. He
now hoped to produce an electrical wave that would follow the same patterns as
someone’s speech.

He won financial backing from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, two wealthy
investors. Hubbard also brought in Anthony Pollok, his patent attorney. The money
enabled Bell to hire Thomas Watson, a skilled electrical engineer, whose knowledge
would complement Bell’s.
Patenting the Telephone
Aged 27, in 1875, Bell and his investors decided the time had come to protect his
intellectual property using patents.Bell had a patent written for transmission of speech
over an electrical wire. He applied for this patent in the UK, because in those days UK
patents were granted only if they had not first been granted in another country. Bell told
his attorney to apply in the USA only after the patent had been granted in the UK.

By 1876, things in the USA had become murkier. In February of that year, Elisha Gray
applied for a US patent for a telephone which used a variable resistor based on a liquid:
salt water. In the transmitter, the liquid resistor transferred to an electric circuit the
vibrations of a needle attached to a diaphragm which had been made to vibrate by sound.
The electrical resistance of the circuit changed in tandem with the needle’s position in the
liquid, and so sound was converted into an equivalent electrical signal. The receiver
converted the electrical signal back into sound using a vibrating needle in liquid connected
to a diaphragm which vibrated to recreate the sound that had been transmitted.

On the same day, Bell’s attorney filed his US patent application. It was only in March 1876
that Bell actually got his invention to work, using a design similar to Gray’s. Hence Gray
lay claim to have invented the telephone.

On the other hand, Bell had established the concept before Gray, and in all
demonstrations of a working phone Bell gave or developed commercially he used his own
setup rather than a water based variable resistor. In fact, in 1875, Bell had filed a patent
for a liquid mercury based variable resistor, predating Gray’s liquid variable resistor
patent.
Bell had to fend off around 600 lawsuits before he could finally rest in bed at night as the
legally acknowledged inventor of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell “Mr. Watson,
come here. I want to see you.” THE FIRST WORDS SPOKEN IN A TELEPHONE CALL:
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL. By summer 1876, Bell was transmitting telephone voice
messages over a line several miles long in Ontario.
Making Money

Near the end of 1876, Bell and his investors offered to sell their patent to Western Union
for $100,000. Western Union ran America’s telegraph wires, and its top people believed
the telephone was just a fad. They thought it would not be profitable. How spectacularly
wrong they were! By 1878, Western Union’s opinion had altered dramatically. They now
thought that if they could offer $25 million to get the patent, they would have gotten it
cheaply. Unfortunately for Western Union, in 1877, the Bell Telephone Company had
been launched. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Not Just the Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell had a restless mind. The telephone made him wealthy and
famous, but he wanted new challenges, and he continued inventing and innovating.
1. The Photophone, or Optical Telephone

Today, it is standard practice to transmit huge amounts of data using photons of light
through optical fiber. In 1880, Bell and his assistant Charles Summer Tainter transmitted
wireless voice messages a distance of over 200 meters in Washington D.C. The voice
messages were carried by a light beam, and Bell patented the photophone. This was two
decades before the first radio messages were sent without wires and a century before
optic fiber communications became commercially viable.
2. The Metal Detector

In 1881, after President James Garfield was shot, Bell invented the metal detector to
locate the bullet precisely. The rudimentary metal detector worked in tests, but the bullet
in the President’s body was too deep to be detected by the early detecting equipment.
3. National Geographic Society

In 1888 Bell was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. In 1897, he
became its second president.
The End

Alexander Graham Bell died aged 75 on August 2, 1922 in Nova Scotia, Canada. He had
been ill for some months with complications from diabetes. He was survived by is wife,
Mabel, and two daughters – Elsie and Marian. Every phone in North America was silenced
during his funeral in his honor. The unit of sound intensity, the bel, more usually seen as
the smaller unit, the decibel, was named after Bell: it was conceived of in the Bell
Laboratories.

Source: https://www.famousscientists.org/alexander-graham-bell/