Invented by Alexander Graham Bell—shown here inaugurating the first line between New York and Chicago—the telephone greatly enhanced long-distance communication, a key factor in national and international trade. (Library of Congress)
A leading inventor, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, whose invention of the telephone revolutionized communications.
Alexander Graham Bell’s father and grandfather were speech teachers and scientists in Great Britain, and Bell also became a speech teacher in Britain before immigrating to Canada with his family in 1870. Bell subsequently introduced his father’s universally applicable system of phonetic notation at a new school for deaf children in Boston, which had emerged as America’s leading city of technological experimentation. Furthermore, in 1873 Bell became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.
As he received financial support from his future father-in-law, Bell began to experiment with transmitting voices through a telegraph-like device. Then in the summer of 1874, Bell conceived the basic principle of the telephone. But he now turned his attention to the creation of a harmonic multiple telegraph that could carry several messages at the same time on a single wire. Although Bell failed to be the first inventor to file for a harmonic telegraph patent at the U.S. Patent Office, he would become the first with applications for significant elements of this type of system. Bell then resumed his work on transmitting voices by wire. In January 1876, he finished his telephone application and a caveat, which was a statement of an untested idea, was filed. A few hours earlier or later (an issue that is still in dispute), Elisha Gray filed a similar caveat. But on March 7, Bell received the patent for the telephone, and three days later Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, conducted the first intelligible telephone conversation. Bell subsequently demonstrated his new invention at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876. Not everyone, however, was amazed by its implications. The New York Tribune asserted, “Of what use is such an invention?”
Invented by Alexander Graham Bell—shown here inaugurating the first line between New York and Chicago—the telephone greatly enhanced long-distance communication, a key factor in national and international trade. (Library of Congress)
In 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was organized. Despite several unsuccessful challenges to Bell’s patent, especially by Western Union, which backed Gray’s claim, the Bell Telephone Company continued to grow and in 1885 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was established to operate the long-distance network. In 1899, AT&T took over the American Bell Telephone Company, which in 1880 had become a successor of the Bell Telephone Company, and became the Bell System’s parent company.
The first commercial telephone switchboard was established in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. By 1887, there were 743 main exchanges with 150,000 subscribers. Nevertheless, by 1900 there was only one telephone for every sixty-six people in the United States. But by the early 1920s, there were more than 10 million telephones in America, and this was just the beginning of the rapid expansion of the telephone industry in the twentieth century throughout the world. By the end of the century, this global communications network included the information superhighway that combined telephone systems with computer networks. The resulting communications revolution fostered and facilitated the growth of worldwide trade.
On August 2, 1922, Bell, who was a diabetic, died at his summer home near the town of Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Steven E. Siry
See also: Communication.
Bruce, Robert V. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.