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Alexander Graham Bell

Inventor of the telephone, whose interest was the mechanism of speech

3 August 1922

The whole world owes a great debt to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, whose death is announced on another page, for his invention of the telephone as it exists to-day. He will assuredly be remembered among the great inventors whose pioneer work has profoundly affected the daily life of all civilised peoples.

The telephone is an electrical instrument, but Bell was not an electrician nor primarily even a physicist, but rather a physiologist whose interest centred on speech and the mechanism of speech. This interest offers a remarkable example of heredity, for his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was an authority on physiological phonetics, and his grandfather, Alexander Bell, one on phonetics and defective speech. Both of them were Scotsmen, and he himself was born in Edinburgh, on March 3, 1847, and was educated at the High School and University of that city. When quite a young man he removed across the Atlantic with his father, and he was only twenty-five when he was appointed professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. The germ of the great invention with which his name is associated came to life white he was at Brantford, in Canada, and his first instrument was made at Boston, though it was descended, perhaps a little irregularly, from observations he had made when he was a pupil teacher in Elgin, Scotland.

At Brantford, in the middle of 1874, he was working on a tuned system of multiple telegraphy, and had attained the conception of an undulatory current, realizing that speech could be transmitted if an armature could be moved as the air is moved during the passage of a sound. At the same time he was studying, by means of a dead man’s ear, the movements of the air during the utterance of a sound, and it struck him that as the small membrane that forms the ear drum can move the comparatively heavy chain of bones in the ear, a larger membrane ought to be able to move an iron armature. By the linking up of these two branches of inquiry the telephone was evolved.

Bell made his first rough speaking telephone in 1875, and the first long-distance transmission of speech dates from August, 1876, when the Dominion Telegraph Company lent him their wires for experiments, the transmitting apparatus being in Paris, Ontario, and the receiver in Brantford, eight miles away. At first transmission was in one direction only, but a few months later, after his return to Boston, reciprocal conversations were carried on between two persons at a distance from each other.

To begin with, the invention was received with a certain amount of incredulity, which on some occasions was perhaps not entirely unjustified. There is a story that when Sir William Preece, at the Royal Institution, was exhibiting some of the earliest specimens brought to this country, he arranged for a wire to Southampton, where he stationed a man with a cornet, who was to play during the lecture. Members of the audience in London were invited to listen to the strains from Southampton, and a little doubtfully admitted that they heard them, but it was afterwards found that the cornet-player had mistaken the day. Even when it was beyond doubt that the apparatus would work, there were shrewd financiers who missed fortunes through regarding it as a mere toy, and Bell told how, in the early days of the commercial exploitation of the telephone, he “created a great smile” by outlining the central exchange system which exists to-day.

Bell was also the inventor of the photo-phone and the graphophone, and he made some experiments in artificial flight. He served as president of the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and was the author of a memoir on the formation of a deaf variety in the human race, and of the census report on the deaf of the United States, 1906. He held various honorary degrees, and was the recipient of the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1902, and of the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1918. The freedom of his native city was conferred on him during a visit he paid to this country at the end of 1920.

It was during that visit also that he gave to The Times an interesting account of the romance of the telephone, which appeared on November 25 in that year. He then made the following comment when asked what he thought of the British telephone system: −

I do not want to say too much about it. I think you do very well, but you do not compare well with the United States, and I think recent history in the United States reveals the cause. We had the best system of telephony in the world before the war in the United States. Then we came into the war, the telephone was taken out of the hands of private companies and run by the Government. Immediately the efficiency of the service fell. Now the control has been returned to the companies, and I hope the efficiency will improve. The decrease in efficiency in consequence of Government ownership is found elsewhere. I visited Australia some years ago, and the telephone system, which was in the hands of the Government, could not be compared to ours in America. I am afraid that the comparatively low state of efficiency in this country as compared with our system in the United States must be attributed to Government ownership. Government ownership aims at cheapness, and cheapness does not necessarily mean efficiency.

Our experience in the United States, now that the control has been returned to the private companies, will form a good test of the value of private ownership. We have hardly a house without the telephone, but in Scotland a few days ago, looking through the telephone lists in our large cities, I was struck by the small number of private individuals with telephones. The telephone certainly has not gone into the homes here as it has in the United States. We do not mind paying for a good service, but we certainly object to pay a big price for a poor service.

Bell married in 1877 Mabel Gardiner, daughter of D. D. Hubbard, by whom he had two daughters.