Essay 20-B: Alexander Graham Bell, the Invention of the Telephone, and the People
In many ways, Alexander Graham Bell had been preparing since childhood for the epic moment that occurred in Boston on March 10, 1876.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland to extraordinary parents – a father who specialized in oration and elocution, and a deaf mother who trained herself to be an accomplished pianist – Bell from a young age possessed enormous curiosity about human speech and how it was transmitted and received. By sixteen, he was teaching music and elocution at a boys’ boarding school. Blessed with a resonant voice as he matured, he devised a unique system for communicating with his mother – unlike most people who spoke to Mrs. Bell through an ear tube, Bell placed his lips very close to her forehead and spoke in low, sonorous tones. He believed his mother could “hear” him through the vibrations his vocal tones would create.
In 1871, at the age of 24, Bell moved to Boston to teach at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes, and a year later, opened his School of Vocal Physiology. He quickly became known as a voice and speech expert, and his services were in great demand. Later that same year, Boston University appointed Bell professor of vocal physiology and elocution at its School of Oratory, where one of his students, Mabel Hubbard, would become his future wife.
At BU, Bell conducted acoustics experiments and worked on plans for a “harmonic telegraph,” which would allow the transmittal of multiple telegraph messages over a single wire using different sound-wave frequencies. Early in 1874, he met a young Boston electrical machinist named Thomas Watson – one account called the chance meeting “one of the most fortuitous in technological history” – and shared with Watson his dream of perfecting another machine that would allow the human voice to travel over wires. The pair forged a partnership and, while Bell was on sabbatical to conduct research, began work on a transmitting and receiving device. At one point in June 1875, the invention transmitted a “twang” from one room to another. An excited Bell believed the complex overtones and timbre of the twang to be similar to those in the human voice. Perhaps it wasn’t just sounds, but spoken words that could be transmitted.
