The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) changed the way the world communicates and founded the company that became AT&T, one of the most successful businesses in American history. But Bell was highly ambivalent about his famous creation and confessed near the end of his life that he found phones an annoyance—refusing even to keep one in his study.
Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and nicknamed Aleck as a child. The sciences of hearing and sound were concerns of his from a young age: His mother, Eliza Grace Symonds (1809–1897), had lost her hearing as a child, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), was a teacher of the deaf and mute who trained his son to follow in his footsteps.
The family immigrated to Canada in 1870 after the deaths of both of Bell’s brothers from tuberculosis. Bell soon moved to Boston, where he was hired to teach at a school for the deaf. (Later, one of his students would be Helen Keller [1880–1968].)
While in Boston, Bell began his experiments on the telephone, aided by his eighteen-year-old assistant, Thomas A. Watson (1854–1934). Bell finally perfected the device in 1876; the famous first words transmitted over a telephone line were “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”
Bell demonstrated the device to the public in 1876, and the first working commercial systems were installed within two years. Bell and his financial backers founded Bell Telephone Company to operate the systems, and the firm became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. AT&T quickly grew into one of the most profitable businesses in the nation, until it was broken up by federal antimonopoly regulators in 1982.
Bell spent most of the rest of his life at his estate in Nova Scotia, focusing on experiments in aeronautics. He also invented a primitive metal detector that was deployed in a desperate effort to locate the bullet that killed President James Garfield (1831–1881). In all, Bell filed eighteen patents during his lifetime.
He died in Nova Scotia at age seventy-five.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Bell was granted the patent for the telephone—number 174,465—on his twenty-ninth birthday.
- The nation’s first citywide phone system opened in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. An original edition of the first phone book, listing 391 subscribers, was auctioned at Christie’s in 2008 for $170,500.
- The bel, a unit of sound intensity, was named in honor of the telephone’s inventor. The unit equaling one-tenth of a bel—the decibel—is more commonly used.
