Alexander Bell: Father of The Telephone

How a 19th-century inventor created modern telecommunication.

Most people have heard of Alexander Graham Bell, the Father of the Telephone. This Scottish-American engineer invented the world’s first phone, and founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company—better known as AT&T. 

During his life from 1847 to 1922, Bell made revolutionary breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of telecommunication. Here is the exciting story behind the phone’s famous inventor. 

Early life

Alexander was born in Edinburgh in 1847. He gained the middle name “Graham” on his eleventh birthday, named after one of his father’s former students and a friend of the family. 

From an early age, Bell took an interest in the study of speech and phonetics. It ran in the family. His father was a professor in the subject, and had developed a phonetic alphabet called Visible Speech. His mother, and later his wife, suffered from deafness. So Bell had plenty of personal motives for his fascination with human speech. 

Bell made his first invention at the age of 12. He was playing with a friend whose family owned a flour mill. Noticing that the mill took very long to process the grain, Alexander built a machine that relied on rotating paddles and nail brushes to accelerate the process. 

Telegraph

Suffering from poor health, the Bell family moved to Brantford, Ontario, where the climate was much better. Alexander set up a workshop in Canada, and he began touring Massachusetts and Connecticut to introduce the Visible Speech system to deaf schools. He worked a teacher for the next few years, first at Boston University and then in his own private practice. During this time, he fell in love with his 15-year-old female student Mabel Hubbard. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, was an influential Massachusetts leader who financed some of Bell’s research. Hubbard and his partner, Thomas Sanders, who also had a deaf child who was tutored by Bell, wanted to secure patents for telegraphy. They agreed to fund Bell’s work toward creating a Harmonic Telegraph. This invention would allow multiple messages to be transmitted at the same time over a single telegraph wire. It was this research that eventually lead Bell to his fateful discovery of the world-changing telephone. 

Telephone

On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke the first-ever words into a telephone. “Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you,” he said. His assistant walked into the office, and the two men switched places. Bell, listening to Thomas Watson reading passages from a book, was only able to hear indistinct, muffled sounds. 

Nevertheless, a few days later, Bell won a patent for his improvements in telegraphy. Hubbard set up Bell Telephone as a joint stock company, and split up shares with Bell, Watson, and Sanders. Owning 1,500 shares in the company, Alexander was poised for riches. Hubbard consented to him marrying his daughter, and Bell married his wife on July 11, 1877. 

Western Union

Western Union was one of the era’s most powerful communications company. In a terrible decision of unprecedented proportions, the Union turned down the chance to buy the telephone patent for a mere $100,000, when the phone was still in its infancy. The company’s president, William Orton, dismissed the revolutionary invention as a frivolous toy. He saw it as impractical, and did not think anyone would use it over telegraphy. This would be a laughingly bad mistake. 

After just two years, the Bell Company valued its phone patent at $25 million. Union was infuriated. They tried to dip their hands into the booming telephone industry, hiring Thomas Edison with creating an improved device. The two companies went to court, and Western Union lost badly. In the ensuing settlement, it surrendered all of its phone-related patents, and agreed to put out of the business entirely in exchange for a few insignificant concessions. 

AG Bell

In 1880, Bell used his newfound riches to establish the Volta Lab in DC, where he continued his pioneering research into sound technology. He founded the Volta Bureau in 1887, which was designed to help deaf people. After a merger, the Bureau survives today as AG Bell. The original headquarters building is still in use, and is regarded as a national historic landmark. Graham Bell remains controversial within the deaf community, because of his advocacy for eugenics. 

The president is shot

On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield was preparing to leave the capital for his summer vacation. At the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, he was assassinated by a disgruntled party loyalist, who shot him at point-blank range with a Bull Dog revolver. The murderer was Charles J. Guiteau, a schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur. 

Hearing the bad news, Graham Bell immediately began working on a metal detector device. He wanted a way to find and extract the bullet from Garfield’s body. Bell tested his device on Civil War veterans, but he found it was inconsistent. But he tried on the president anyway in late July. He tried again on August 1, but was still not able to pinpoint the location of the bullet. 

Despite Bell’s well-intentioned efforts, he was unable to save the president. Garfield died of sepsis and malnutrition on September 19. 

Later years

Although unable to save President Garfield, Bell continued to innovate prolifically. He made all kinds of patents in his latter years. With Charles Sumner Tainter, he created an improved version of the phonograph, called the graphophone. The two men set up a Volta company for the invention, which eventually merged with Columbia Records. 

Bell invented a photophore, which transmitted audio messages over 650 feet away. However, this impressive discovery only became useful after the invention of fiber optics. In the field of aeronautics, he founded the Aerial Experiment Association. He also made innovations in boat technology. 

Bell served as the second president of the National Geographic Society. Under his leadership, it became one of the world’s prestigious non-profit scientific organizations in the world. 

After a lifetime of scientific breakthroughs, Graham Bell died in 1922. For the last century, he has maintained a privileged place in the pantheon of technological innovators. Every time we pick up the phone for a call—be it FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, or whatever—we have Bell to thank for it all. 

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