Alexander Graham Bell’s grandfather was a distinguished elocutionist. His father, a speech teacher
of great repute, invented visible speech, an alphabet designed to teach the
deaf to speak. Alexander Graham Bell became a teacher of speech to the deaf, but
he also showed interest in artificial speech and in the transmission of tones
(see Sound) and speech by electronic means.
In 1870, the Bells moved from Great Britain to Canada. Young Alexander Graham
Bell went to Boston to teach the deaf with his father’s visible speech alphabet. Boston was a center of commerce and technology.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1865, experimentation
involving Electricity and Telegraphy flourished. Possibly as important for fledging inventor with little
experience in electricity or telegraphy, Charles Williams Jr. had his workshop in
Boston. Edison, Thomas had worked there. Williams had the expertise to build working electrical
instruments.
Although he taught for a living, Bell wanted to build a harmonic telegraph which would transmit several messages at once over the same wire, each
message transmitted in a different pitch (similar to Frequency Division Multiplexing), with the messages decoded by tuned receivers. In October 1872, the Boston
Transcript featured an article about Joseph Stern’s duplex telegraph, which sent massages simultaneously in both directions over
the line. Stearns was one of Williams’ customers. Bell also heard a lecture at M.I.T. by Edward C Pickering, who
described how an intermittent Current sent through an electromagnet (see Electromagnetic Field(s) ) could vibrate a tin plate diaphragm, thereby producing a tone.
The March 1874 demonstrations at M.I.T. of two devices that utilized vibrating
membranes to translate speech into visible form may have inspired Bell to
continue.
Bell pursued telegraphy part time. He faced a formidable rival in Elisha
Gray, electrician, inventor, and founder of Western Electric, who had worked since
1866 or 1867 on the transmission of tones. By 1874, Gray had developed a
receiver that responded to tone, but his transmitter did not work because it did not
respond to sounds from, or through, the Air. He Gray called his instrument a telephone.
In July 1874, Bell conceived of complex sounds reduced to an irregular wavy line. Vibrations would induce a continuous fluctuating current which would be
transmitted and then transformed at the end of the line into a magnetic (see Magnetism) force.
Unfortunately, Bell was torn between work on the speculative telephone and his
telegraph project which seemed to have more commercial potential. The
multiple telegraph interested Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, both parents of Bell’s deaf pupils. Hubbard, who later became Bell’s father-in-law, was an influential attorney, promoter, civic leader, and
member of the Congressional Postal Committee. He had feuded with Western Union for
years, and once proposed the formation of a U.S. Postal Telegraph Co. designed
to undercut Western Union. Sanders, was a wealthy leather merchant. Both
decided to back Bell’s telegraph work. Bell now had the money to hire a experienced assistant,
Thomas A. Watson, an electrician at Williams’ shop. Bell and Watson worked for months without satisfactory results. In
June 1875, Bell decided to go back to the telephone.
In the evening of March 10, 1876, Watson heard the first words transmitted
over the wire (see Conductor). Watson, at the receiving end, claimed that Bell, having spilled acid,
shouted into the transmitter, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!” Bell’s recollection, at the transmitting end, omitted the acid and remembered the
immortal words as “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!” Either way, Watson heard and came. For months thereafter, Bell and Watson
alternated between improving and publicizing their unreliable invention.
Finally, Bell reaped and publicity bonanza, courtesy of the tropical branch of the
House of Braganza.
Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil had come to the United States. In Boston, he
saw Alexander Graham Bell teach visible speech to the deaf. Shortly thereafter,
Gardiner Hubbard, ever the promoter, used his influence to get Bell’s telephone into the Massachusetts exhibit a Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. On June 25, 1876, the judges made their rounds of
the exposition, accompanied by Dom Pedro. They hear Gray’s instrument, which transmitted tones. Then Dom Pedro noticed Bell, and
greeted him. The judges came along. Bell gave a demonstration. Dom Pedro
listened, jumped up, and said, “I hear, I hear!” Or (in Portuguese), “My God! It talks!” depending on one’s source of information. Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), one of the
judges, cited the telephone as “the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph.” Despite the approval and publicity, Bell and his cohorts began to wonder if
they had a practical device. Late in 1876 or early in 1877, Hubbard tried to
sell the telephone to Western Union for $100,000. President Orton of Western
Union, making one of the worst decisions in business history, refused the offer.
Orton had already hired Thomas A Edison to improve the telephone, or to put it
less charitably; to find a way around Bell’s patents. Orton had not counted out the telephone. He just did not want it
form his old foe, Hubbard.
On January 30, 1877, Bell received patent number 186,787 for an improved
telephone with a transmitter-receiver, permanent magnet and metallic diaphragm.