#3: Bell and the Telephone

Looking back at a controversial scientific innovator ...

In a notebook now residing in the Library of Congress, inventor and scientist Alexander Graham Bell recorded the events of Friday, March 10, 1876.

On that day, Bell was in Boston experimenting with an acoustic telegraph. It was a boxy apparatus that included a membrane of cow intestine stretched over a magnetized iron armature, meant to mimic the eardrum. Bell spoke the famous words, heard by his assistant in another room: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Later that day, Bell wrote a letter to his father.

“Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly this afternoon,” Bell enthused, adding, “I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem — and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.”

In my job as a PR consultant, and in my even more important job as a husband and dad, I spend much of my day on the phone. It’s impossible to overstate the extraordinary role this device has played in communication over the last century. Like many historic inventions, including the lightbulb, its creation is controversial. Bell’s work was the culmination of the efforts of many, including inventor Elisha Gray, from whom Bell may or may not have stolen the idea for a liquid transmitter. A 2002 resolution by Congress recognized the inventor of the telephone as Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci, who shared a laboratory with Bell but could not afford to patent his talking telegraph in 1871.

What fascinates me about Alexander Graham Bell is not his alleged invention of the telephone. Indeed, Mr. Bell had little use for the device and refused to keep one in his office. He was a polarizing figure, an enterprising Scottish immigrant, a tutor of the deaf and professor of elocution whose life — whose entire family legacy — was devoted to unlocking the mysteries of how humans communicate.

In the mid-19th century, continental Europe had been transformed by the industrial revolution. Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, which had already been in operation for more than 260 years, counted among its faculty a prominent lecturer on speech elocution. Alexander Melville Bell had studied under his father, Alexander Bell, who was also a leading authority on the topic. The surname Bell possibly originated from a bell maker or ringer; this was a family with sound in its blood.

In 1847, Alexander Melville Bell and his wife welcomed their second son, whom they named Alexander Bell, after his grandfather. It wasn’t until his 11th birthday that young Aleck, as he was known, got his wish to have a middle name. Graham was chosen in honor of a family friend.

At a young age, Alexander Graham Bell displayed an aptitude for music, botany, poetry, and inventing. He became an accomplished pianist, and at the age of 12 invented a dehusking machine for a friend whose family operated a flour mill. At around this same time, Bell’s mother began to lose her hearing, a development that would shape the trajectory of his life.

Alexander Melville Bell emerged as the preeminent scholar on speech elocution in the 19th century. He was particularly known for developing Visible Speech, a system of notation that visually displayed the movement and positions of the mouth while speaking.

“Aleck” became an expert on Visible Speech and assisted his father in demonstrations, often astounding audiences by flawlessly pronouncing passages written in Latin and even Sanskrit, though he did not speak these languages.

Bell also taught at a school for the deaf and later opened an institution of his own. His wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell, was herself deaf and was instrumental in pushing Bell to international fame; he was not planning to attend the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where the new telephone would be displayed. Mabel secretly packed Bell’s bag and took him to the train station. When he attempted to protest, she literally turned a deaf ear to him.

Fun fact: In those early days, you had to speak with a live operator to place a call. A Kansas-based Civil War veteran and undertaker named Almon Strowger became convinced that rival funeral homes were conspiring with operators to send customers their way. This inspired him to invent the automatic telephone exchange and in 1892, the first rotary phone.

While he is best remembered for the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell viewed the device as merely one chapter in a life devoted to human advancement. He was a co-founder of the journal Science, invented the first metal detector, and was even an early pioneer in aviation.

But Bell’s legacy is not without controversy. He believed deaf individuals should learn how to speak to better integrate into society, and as a result opposed the use of sign language — a view that today is widely criticized. This and other issues are further explored in the 2021 biography The Invention of Miracles by Katie Booth.

Whether it was conceived by Bell, Gray, or Meucci, the telephone forever transformed business, international diplomacy, and everyday human relationships. Bell imagined that telephone wires would carry voices to homes like water or gas, and indeed they would. Equally prophetic was Nikola Tesla’s 1926 prediction that when wireless technology was perfected, people would see and hear one another across vast distances using devices we carried in our pockets.

Each time we pick up the phone, we are living in the extraordinary future these scientific visionaries foretold.