Although inventors often leave behind accurate, written accounts of their great discoveries, it is not unusual for myths to spring up around the circumstances surrounding these momentous events. In the case of the creation of the telephone, on March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his partner, Thomas A. Watson, attempted to transmit a voice between two adjoining rooms in a house using electrical current. Bell thought that a receiver wire dipped in acid would strengthen the current. Legend has it that he accidentally spilled some acid on himself and called to his partner in the other room for help: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Watson heard Bell’s famous words through the wire and came running. As it turned out, Bell didn’t burn himself with acid. He had heard sounds coming through the wire the minute Watson had finished setting things up at his end. Watson hadn’t said a word, but Bell wanted to let him know the invention worked!
Given his surname, it seems only natural that Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847, would be interested in sound. Alexander’s father and grandfather were celebrated professors of "elocution," which can be compared to public speaking today. Alexander’s father published an important book called Visible Speech, about how to teach speech to the deaf with a system of cryptic symbols that showed vocal sounds and how to make them. Bell’s mother, Eliza, who started to lose her hearing at about age 12, also had a profound influence on her son’s life. She proved to him that intelligence had no relationship to hearing ability. Born with a rich, expressive voice, Bell found a way to communicate with her by speaking in low, resonant tones aimed toward her forehead. He believed the vibrations in his voice were more important than loudness to communicate to her effectively, an insight that proved invaluable in his later work. Obsessed with sound, Alexander and his brother Melville studied the human airway and the tongue, and as teenagers, created a crude speaking machine out of rubber, wood, and wire that could say "Ma ma!" The boys were delighted when a houseguest heard the sound and started looking for a baby calling for its mother.
Bell’s curiosity grew as he got older, and he experimented with tuning forks, trying to measure the pitches of vocal sounds. At the age of 18, he was nominated for membership in the London Philological Society, a scholarly group devoted to the study of speech and language, a field known today as linguistics. He met a scientist who recommended a book by Hermann von Helmholtz, a German mathematician whose research involved tuning forks. The book, On Sensations of Tone, changed Bell’s life. He noted that Helmholtz had created an electric tuning-fork device that could produce a vowel sound. Bell reasoned that if electricity could produce a vowel sound, it could generate consonants, music—any sound at all.
Bell grew up in a dangerous world. Diseases like scarlet fever, the measles, and the mumps frequently caused deafness, and the smoggy air of Edinburgh created health problems for the Bell family. After both Bell’s brothers died from tuberculosis, the family decided to migrate to Brantford, Ontario, in Canada, in search of a better climate. There, a converted carriage house became his workshop; behind it, in a pleasant spot overlooking a river, Bell set aside a "dreaming place" where he could think about his ideas. Years later, he would use a houseboat as his "thinking place."
In April 1871, Bell became a speech teacher at a noted Boston school for the deaf, and his success as a teacher made him famous in the deaf community, leading Helen Keller’s father to ask him for help in finding the right teacher for his daughter. Bell helped the Keller family find Anne Sullivan. When Helen Keller visited Bell years later in 1901, she gushed, "He makes you feel if you only had a little more time, you too might be an inventor."
In October 1874, Bell began a partnership with Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the fathers of two of his students. The men financed his experiments, hoping to improve upon the all-important telegraph, the long-distance communication device that used coded impulses transmitted through electrical wires. Back then, a telegraph wire could send only one message at a time. Bell believed he could find a way to transmit multiple messages at the same time. Many other inventors were working on this same idea, called a "harmonic telegraph," and the competition was fierce. Although Bell was not awarded the patent for the harmonic telegraph, his experiments eventually led to the creation of the telephone. He was so excited about his work on the telephone that he wrote to his father on February 29, 1876, "If I succeed in securing that patent. . . the whole thing is mine . . . and I am sure of fame, fortune, and success if I can only persevere in perfecting my apparatus."
Meanwhile, Bell fell in love with Mabel Hubbard, one of his deaf students and Hubbard’s daughter. Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer and former congressman, made certain Bell’s discoveries were sufficiently documented, and his patent applications properly written and filed as early as possible. Concerned that Bell would lose the rights to all the results of his hard work, Hubbard arranged to apply for the telephone patent without Bell’s consent, and the patent was actually issued before Bell had his "eureka moment" with Watson. Afterward, Bell married Mabel Hubbard and gave most of his shares in the new Bell Telephone Company to her.
Bell’s patent may be the most valuable single patent ever issued. Over the next few decades, it was legally challenged over six hundred times, but it prevailed. Bell later wrote to his wife, "Why should it matter to the world who invented the telephone so long as the world gets the benefit of it? Why should it matter to me what the world says on the subject so long as I have obtained the object for which I labored and have got you, my sweet darling wife?"
Throughout his life, Bell had a love of learning that he was eager to share. The money his success brought him helped him to create Science magazine and the National Geographic Society. His advice to young people was not to walk through life with their eyes shut. "There are things around us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked."
It is no exaggeration to say that Bell’s invention of the telephone changed the world, but Bell was also a pioneer in the field of fiber optics. Other inventions by Bell included a vacuum jacket, an iron-lung-type breathing apparatus that he worked on after his sons died in infancy of respiratory problems; and a forerunner of contemporary metal detectors that he invented in hopes of locating the bullet that killed U.S. President James Garfield. Bell studied condensation, worked on finding ways to remove the salt from seawater, and predicted that air pollution from fossil fuels might produce a "greenhouse effect." He loved to spend his summers working in his laboratory on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. "There seems to be always something going where I am," he said. "Nothing, perhaps, that would interest other people, but it keeps me busy and interested all the time."
When Bell died on August 2, 1922, telephones all throughout the United States and Canada fell silent for one minute in tribute.