The Deaf Inventors Sound Machine

It is most likely that both Bell and Gray independently devised their telephone designs as an outgrowth of their work on harmonic telegraphy. However, the question of priority of invention between the two has been controversial from the very beginning. Despite having the patent, Bell did not have a fully functioning instrument. He first produced intelligible speech on March 10, , when he summoned his laboratory assistant, Thomas A. Watson—come here—I want to see you.

In August of that year, he was on the receiving end of the first one-way long-distance call, transmitted from Brantford to nearby Paris, Ontario, over a telegraph wire. Although his invention rendered him independently wealthy, he sold off most of his stock holdings in the company early and did not profit as much as he might have had he retained his shares. Thus, by the mids his role in the telephone industry was marginal. By that time, Bell had developed a growing interest in the technology of sound recording and playback. Although Edison had invented the phonograph in , he soon turned his attention to other technologies, especially electric power and lighting, and his machine, which recorded and reproduced sound on a rotating cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, remained an unreliable and cumbersome device.

In the French government awarded Bell the Volta Prize, given for achievement in electrical science. Bell used the prize money to set up his Volta Laboratory, an institution devoted to studying deafness and improving the lives of the deaf, in Washington, D. There he also devoted himself to improving the phonograph. By Bell and his colleagues his cousin Chichester A. Bell and the inventor Charles Sumner Tainter had a design fit for commercial use that featured a removable cardboard cylinder coated with mineral wax.

They called their device the Graphophone and applied for patents, which were granted in The group formed the Volta Graphophone Company to produce their invention. Then in they sold their patents to the American Graphophone Company, which later evolved into the Columbia Phonograph Company. Bell used his proceeds from the sale to endow the Volta Laboratory. Bell undertook two other noteworthy research projects at the Volta Laboratory. In he began research on using light as a means to transmit sound. In British scientist Willoughby Smith discovered that the element selenium , a semiconductor , varied its electrical resistance with the intensity of incident light.

Bell sought to use this property to develop the photophone, an invention he regarded as at least equal to his telephone. He was able to demonstrate that the photophone was technologically feasible , but it did not develop into a commercially viable product. Nevertheless, it contributed to research into the photovoltaic effect that had practical applications later in the 20th century.

The origin of this effort was the shooting of U. Garfield in July Bell decided that a promising approach was to use an induction balance, a by-product of his research on canceling out electrical interference on telephone wires. Bell determined that a properly configured induction balance would emit a tone when a metal object was brought into proximity with it. Surgeons adopted it, and it was credited with saving lives during the Boer War — and World War I — In September the Bell family vacationed in Nova Scotia, Canada, and immediately fell in love with the climate and landscape.

During the s Bell shifted his attention to heavier-than-air flight. Starting in , inspired by the research of American scientist Samuel Pierpont Langley , he experimented with wing shapes and propeller blade designs. He continued his experiments even after Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first successful powered, controlled flight in In Bell founded the Aerial Experiment Association , which made significant progress in aircraft design and control and contributed to the career of pioneer aviator Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

In , at the age of 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky , where, as an employee of Western Union , he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. Edison requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter pre-occupation cost him his job.

One night in , he was working with a lead—acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below. The next morning Edison was fired. One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope , who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey , home. Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker.

His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, U. Patent 90, , which was granted on June 1, Edison's major innovation was the establishment of an industrial research lab in Edison was legally attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

William Joseph Hammer , a consulting electrical engineer, started working for Edison and began his duties as a laboratory assistant in December He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator , electric lighting , and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device see Hammer Historical Collection of Incandescent Electric Lamps. In , he was appointed chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works.

According to Edison, Hammer was "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting". Sprague , a competent mathematician and former naval officer , was recruited by Edward H. Johnson and joined the Edison organization in Despite the common belief that Edison did not use mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his electric lighting system including lamp resistance by an analysis of Ohm's Law , Joule's Law and economics.

Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for a year period and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents , which protect an ornamental design for up to a year period. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art.

The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented as describing the first device to record and reproduce sounds. In just over a decade, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material".

Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds ' famous quotation: With Menlo Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey , with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him wider notice was the phonograph in His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder.

Despite its limited sound quality and that the recordings could be played only a few times, the phonograph made Edison a celebrity. Joseph Henry , president of the National Academy of Sciences and one of the most renowned electrical scientists in the US, described Edison as "the most ingenious inventor in this country In , Edison began work to improve the microphone for telephones at that time called a "transmitter" by developing a carbon microphone , which consists of two metal plates separated by granules of carbon that would change resistance with the pressure of sound waves.

A steady direct current is passed between the plates through the granules and the varying resistance results in a modulation of the current, creating a varying electric current that reproduces the varying pressure of the sound wave. Up to that point, microphones, such as the ones developed by Johann Philipp Reis and Alexander Graham Bell , worked by generating a weak current. The carbon microphone works by modulating a direct current and, subsequently, using a transformer to transfer the signal so generated to the telephone line.

Edison was one of many inventors working on the problem of creating a usable microphone for telephony by having it modulate an electrical current passed through it. Edison used the carbon microphone concept in to create an improved telephone for Western Union. This type was put in use in [40] and was used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the s. In , Edison began working on a system of electrical illumination, something he hoped could compete with gas and oil based lighting. Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent lamps, including Alessandro Volta 's demonstration of a glowing wire in and inventions by Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans.

Others who developed early and commercially impractical incandescent electric lamps included Humphry Davy , James Bowman Lindsay , Moses G. Farmer , [43] William E. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as an extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high electric current drawn, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. This lamp must have high resistance and use relatively low voltage around volts.

After many experiments, first with carbon filaments and then with platinum and other metals, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The idea of using this particular raw material originated from Edison's recalling his examination of a few threads from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the present-day state of Wyoming , where he and other members of a scientific team had traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July 29, , from the Continental Divide. Morgan , Spencer Trask , [53] and the members of the Vanderbilt family.

Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, , in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said: Villard was impressed and requested Edison install his electric lighting system aboard Villard's company's new steamer, the Columbia. Although hesitant at first, Edison agreed to Villard's request.

Most of the work was completed in May , and the Columbia went to New York City , where Edison and his personnel installed Columbia' s new lighting system. The Columbia was Edison's first commercial application for his incandescent light bulb. The Edison equipment was removed from Columbia in Latimer had received a patent in January for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons", an improved method for the production of carbon filaments for light bulbs. Latimer worked as an engineer, a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation on electric lights.

Sawyer and was, therefore, invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, , when a judge ruled that Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. Mahen Theatre in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic , opened in , and was the first public building in the world to use Edison's electric lamps. Francis Jehl , Edison's assistant in the invention of the lamp, supervised the installation. After devising a commercially viable electric light bulb on October 21, , Edison developed an electric " utility " to compete with the existing gas light utilities.

On September 4, , Edison switched on his Pearl Street generating station's electrical power distribution system, which provided volts direct current DC to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. In January , Edison switched on the first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps and several private dwellings within a short distance of the station.

On January 19, , the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey. As Edison expanded his direct current DC power delivery system, he received stiff competition from companies installing alternating current AC systems. From the early s AC arc lighting systems for streets and large spaces had been an expanding business in the US. With the development of transformers in Europe and by Westinghouse Electric in the US in —, it became possible to transmit AC long distances over thinner and cheaper wires, and "step down" the voltage at the destination for distribution to users.

This allowed AC to be used in street lighting and in lighting for small business and domestic customers, the market Edison's patented low voltage DC incandescent lamp system was designed to supply. Edison's DC plants could not deliver electricity to customers more than one mile from the plant, and left a patchwork of unsupplied customers between plants. Small cities and rural areas could not afford an Edison style system at all, leaving a large part of the market without electrical service.

AC companies expanded into this gap. Edison expressed views that AC was unworkable and the high voltages used were dangerous. As George Westinghouse installed his first AC systems in , Thomas Edison struck out personally against his chief rival stating, " Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.

One notion is that the inventor could not grasp the more abstract theories behind AC and was trying to avoid developing a system he did not understand. Edison also appeared to have been worried about the high voltage from misinstalled AC systems killing customers and hurting the sales of electric power systems in general.

By the end of , Edison Electric was losing market share to Westinghouse, who had built 68 AC-based power stations to Edison's DC-based stations.

Parallel to expanding competition between Edison and the AC companies was rising public furor over a series of deaths in the spring of caused by pole mounted high voltage alternating current lines. This turned into a media frenzy against high voltage alternating current and the seemingly greedy and callous lighting companies that used it. Brown in a propaganda campaign, aiding Brown in the public electrocution of animals with AC, and supported legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system in what was now being referred to as a "battle of currents".

The development of the electric chair was used in an attempt to portray AC as having a greater lethal potential than DC and smear Westinghouse at the same time via Edison colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator.

Thomas Edison's staunch anti-AC tactics were not sitting well with his own stockholders. By the early s, Edison's company was generating much smaller profits than its AC rivals, and the War of Currents would come to an end in with Edison forced out of controlling his own company. That year, the financier J. General Electric now controlled three-quarters of the US electrical business and would compete with Westinghouse for the AC market.

Edison moved from Menlo Park after the death of his first wife, Mary, in , and purchased a home known as " Glenmont " in as a wedding gift for his second wife, Mina, in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison and Mina spent many winters at their home in Fort Myers, and Edison tried to find a domestic source of natural rubber. Due to the security concerns around World War I , Edison suggested forming a science and industry committee to provide advice and research to the US military, and he headed the Naval Consulting Board in Edison became concerned with America's reliance on foreign supply of rubber and was determined to find a native supply of rubber.

Edison's work on rubber took place largely at his research laboratory in Fort Myers, which has been designated as a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Initially, only Ford and Firestone were to contribute funds to the project while Edison did all the research. Edison did the majority of the research and planting, sending results and sample rubber residues to his West Orange Lab. Edison employed a two-part Acid-base extraction , to derive latex from the plant material after it was dried and crushed to a powder.

Edison decided on Solidago leavenworthii , also known as Leavenworth's Goldenrod. Edison is credited with designing and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope , a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs. The fundamental design of Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, although Edison abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally. Dally made himself an enthusiastic human guinea pig for the fluoroscopy project and was exposed to a poisonous dose of radiation.

He later died of injuries related to the exposure. In , a shaken Edison said: Edison invented a highly sensitive device, that he named the tasimeter , which measured infrared radiation. His impetus for its creation was the desire to measure the heat from the solar corona during the total Solar eclipse of July 29, The key to Edison's fortunes was telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity.

This allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock ticker , the first electricity-based broadcast system. On August 9, , Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph.

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Edison was also granted a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph". He did the electromechanical design while his employee W. Dickson , a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, In April , Thomas Armat 's Vitascope , manufactured by the Edison factory and marketed in Edison's name, was used to project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City.

Later, he exhibited motion pictures with voice soundtrack on cylinder recordings, mechanically synchronized with the film. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus a dozen machines. Bush placed from October 17, , the first kinetoscopes in London. In the last three months of , the Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in Europe i. The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists.

The businessman Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative in starting this business. In , he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France. Edison's film studio made close to 1, films. The majority of the productions were short films showing everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls including titles such as Fred Ott's Sneeze , The Kiss , The Great Train Robbery , Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and the first Frankenstein film in In , when the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island announced they would execute Topsy the elephant by strangulation, poisoning, and electrocution with the electrocution part ultimately killing the elephant , Edison Manufacturing sent a crew to film it, releasing it that same year with the title Electrocuting an Elephant.

As the film business expanded, competing exhibitors routinely copied and exhibited each other's films. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era. In , Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company , which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios commonly known as the Edison Trust. Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America , which was founded in Edison said his favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation.

He thought that talkies had "spoiled everything" for him. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf. Starting in the late s, Thomas Edison became interested and involved with mining. High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast of the United States and Edison tried to mine low-grade ore. Edison developed a process using rollers and crushers that could pulverize rocks up to 10 tons. The dust was then sent between three giant magnets that would pull the iron ore from the dust.

Despite the failure of his mining company, the Edison Ore Milling Company , Edison used some of the materials and equipment to produce cement. In , Edison visited an industrial exhibition in the Sudbury area in Ontario, Canada and thought nickel and cobalt deposits there could be used in his production of electrical equipment.

He returned as a mining prospector and is credited with the original discovery of the Falconbridge ore body. His attempts to mine the ore body were not successful, and he abandoned his mining claim in The Edison Storage Battery Company was founded in Another competitor was Professor Amos E. Dolbear, who insisted that Bell's telephone was only an improvement on an invention by Johann Reis, a German who had experimented with pigs' ears and may have made a telephone.

Dolbear's own instrument could transmit tones but not voice quality. Later that year Bell and Western Union formed a joint company, with the latter getting 20 percent for providing wires, equipment, and the like. Theodore Vail, organizer of Bell Telephone Company, combined six companies in The modern transmitter was born mainly in the work of Emile Berliner and Edison in and Francis Blake in Blake's transmitter was later sold to Bell.

The claims of other inventors were contested. Daniel Drawbaugh, who was from rural Pennsylvania and had little formal schooling, almost won a legal battle with Bell in but was defeated by a four-to-three vote in the Supreme Court the highest court in the United States. This claim made for the most exciting lawsuit over telephone patents. Altogether the Bell Company was involved in lawsuits, of which five went to the Supreme Court.

Bell won every case. The defending argument for Bell was that no competitor had claimed to be original until seventeen months after Bell's patent. Also, at the Philadelphia Exposition, major electrical scientists, especially Lord Kelvin — , the world's leading authority, had declared Bell's invention to be "new. Bell and others organized The American Telephone and Telegraph Company in to operate other long-distance lines. By there were 11, miles of underground wires in New York City. At the laboratory Bell and his associates worked on various projects during the s, including the photophone, induction balance, audiometer, and phonograph improvements.

The photophone transmitted speech by light. The induction balance electric probe located metal in the body. The audiometer, used to test a person's hearing, indicated Bell's continued interest in deafness. The first successful phonograph record was produced. The Columbia Gramophone Company made profitable Bell's phonograph records.

Alexander Graham Bell | The Canadian Encyclopedia

With the profits Bell established an organization in Washington to study deafness. Bell was also involved in other activities that took much of his time. The magazine Science later the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in because of Bell's efforts.

He made many addresses and published many papers. As National Geographic Society president from to , he contributed to the success of the society and its publications. In he became a member of a governing board of the Smithsonian Institution. He was also involved in sheep breeding, hydrodynamics the study of the forces of fluids, such as water , and projects related to aviation, or the development and design of airplanes.

Aviation was Bell's primary interest after He aided physicist and astronomer Samuel Langley — , who experimented with heavier-than-air flying machines; invented a special kite ; and founded the Aerial Experiment Association , bringing together aviator and inventor Glenn Curtiss — , Francis Baldwin, and others. Curtiss provided the motor for Bell's man-carrying kite in His contribution to the modern world and its technologies was enormous. Scottish-born American inventor and teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell is best known for perfecting the telephone to transmit vocal messages by electricity.

The telephone inaugurated a new age in communication technology. Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, , in Edinburgh. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was an expert in vocal physiology and elocution; his grandfather, Alexander Bell, was an elocution professor. In London he studied Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz's experiments with tuning forks and magnets to produce complex sounds. In Bell made scientific studies of the resonance of the mouth while speaking.

He went to Boston in to teach at Sarah Fuller's School for the Deaf, the first such school in the world. He also tutored private students, including Helen Keller. As professor of vocal physiology and speech at Boston University in , he initiated conventions for teachers of the deaf. From to Bell experimented with a phonautograph, a multiple telegraph, and an electric speaking telegraph the telephone. Funds came from the fathers of two of his pupils; one of these men, Gardiner Hubbard, had a deaf daughter, Mabel, who later became Bell's wife. To help deaf children, Bell experimented in the summer of with a human ear and attached bones, a tympanum, magnets, and smoked glass.

Unlike the telegraph's use of intermittent current, the telephone requires continuous current with varying intensity. That same year he invented a harmonic telegraph, to transmit several messages simultaneously over one wire, and a telephonic-telegraphic receiver. Trying to reproduce the human voice electrically, he became expert with electric wave transmission.

Bell supplied the ideas; Thomas Watson made and assembled the equipment. Working with tuned reeds and magnets to synchronize a receiving instrument with a sender, they transmitted a musical note on June 2, The exact hour was not recorded, but on that same day Elisha Gray filed his caveat intention to invent for a telephone.

It was the most valuable single patent ever issued, and it opened a new age in communication technology. By accident, Bell sent the first sentence, "Watson, come here; I want you, " on March 10, The first demonstration occurred at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convention in Boston 2 months later. Bell's display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition a month later gained more publicity, and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil ordered telephones for his country. The telephone, accorded only 18 words in the official catalog of the exposition, suddenly became the "star" attraction.

Repeated demonstrations overcame public skepticism. The first reciprocal outdoor conversation was between Boston and Cambridge, Mass. In the first telephone was installed in a private home; a conversation was conducted between Boston and New York , using telegraph lines; in May, the first switchboard, devised by E.

Holmes in Boston, was a burglar alarm connecting five banks; and in July the first organization to commercialize the invention, the Bell Telephone Company, was formed. The first commercial switchboard was set up in New Haven , Conn. Switchboards were improved by Charles Scribner, with more than inventions.

Thomas Cornish, a Philadelphia electrician, had a switchboard for eight customers and published a one-page directory in Other inventors had been at work. Between and Professor Elisha Gray of Oberlin College invented an "automatic self-adjusting telegraph relay, " installed it in hotels, and made telegraph printers and repeaters. He tried to perfect a speaking telephone from his harmonic multiple-current telegraph.

Dolbear, who insisted that Bell's telephone was only an improvement on an invention by Johann Reis, a German, who had experimented with pigs' ear membranes and may have made a telephone. Dolbear's own instrument, operating by "make and break" current, could transmit pitch but not voice quality. Later that year Bell and Western Union formed a joint company, with the latter getting 20 percent for providing wires, circuits, and equipment. Theodore Vail, organizer of Bell Telephone Company, consolidated six companies in The modern transmitter evolved mainly from the work of Emile Berliner and Edison in and Francis Blake in Blake's transmitter was later sold to Bell for stock.

Daniel Drawbaugh, from rural Pennsylvania, with little formal schooling, almost won a legal battle with Bell in but was defeated by a 4 to 3 vote in the Supreme Court. The claim by this "Edison of the Cumberland Valley" was the most exciting and futile litigation over telephone patents. Altogether, the Bell Company was involved in lawsuits, of which 5 went to the Supreme Court; Bell won every case.

A convincing argument was that no competitor claimed originality until 17 months after Bell's patent. Also, at the Philadelphia Exposition, eminent electrical scientists, especially Lord Kelvin, the world's foremost authority, had declared it to be "new. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was organized by Bell and others in to operate other long-distance lines.

By , when insulation was perfected, there were 11, miles of underground wires in New York City. At the laboratory he and associates worked on various projects during the s, including the photophone, induction balance, audiometer, and phonograph improvements. The photophone transmitted speech by light, using a primitive photoelectric cell.

The audiometer indicated Bell's continued interest in deafness.

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The first successful phonograph record, a shellac cylinder, as well as wax disks and cylinders, was produced. The Columbia Gramophone Company exploited Bell's phonograph records. With the profits Bell established the Volta Bureau in Washington to study deafness. Other activities took much time. The magazine Science later the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in because of Bell's efforts.

He made numerous addresses and published many monographs. As National Geographic Society president from to , he fostered the success of the society and its publications. In he became a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He was also involved in sheep breeding, hydrodynamics, and aviation projects. He aided Samuel Langley, invented the tetrahedral kite , and founded the Aerial Experiment Association , bringing together Glenn Curtiss, Francis Baldwin, and others.

They devised the aileron control principle which replaced "wing warping" , developed the hydroplane, and solved balance problems in flying machines. Curtiss furnished the motor for Bell's man-carrying kite in Bell died at Baddeck, Nova Scotia , on Aug. MacKenzie, Alexander Graham Bell , is interesting and contains much personal information. Thomas Bertram Costain, Chord of Steel , a recent history of the telephone, discusses Bell at length.

Herbert Casson, The History of the Telephone , is still useful for the early story. For the story of Bell's persistent rival see Warren J. Harder, Daniel Drawbaugh In Alexander Graham Bell — , at age twenty-nine, invented the telephone. Throughout the remainder of his long and productive life, Bell continued his work as an inventor, eventually securing eighteen patents in his name. In addition he maintained a lifelong commitment to the education of the deaf.

Bell was born in Edinburgh , Scotland , to a family of eminent speech educators and musicians. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught speech to the deaf and the mute and wrote textbooks on correct speech. Bell's mother was a portrait painter and an accomplished musician.

Alexander Graham Bell

Bell received his early education at home and graduated at age fourteen from the Royal High School, Edinburgh. He then enrolled as a student teacher at Weston House, a nearby boys' school, where he taught music and speech and in turn received instruction in other subjects.

Bell also studied briefly at Edinburgh University. In his late teens, Bell worked as an assistant to his father, promoting "visible" speech, a system developed by his father that shows the articulation of sound on the lips, tongue, and throat. Bell became deeply interested in the study of sound, especially as it affects hearing and speech, and he followed this interest throughout his life.

When young Bell's two brothers died of tuberculosis, their father took the family to the healthier climate of Ontario , Canada , in Bell soon moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and in opened his own school for training teachers of the deaf. In he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.

Bell's interest in speech and communication led him to investigate the transmission of sound over wires. Backed financially in his investigations by Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, grateful fathers of two of his deaf pupils, he experimented with developing the harmonic telegraph, a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a single wire. Using vibrating membranes and an actual human ear in his tests, Bell also investigated the possibility of transmitting the human voice by wire.

Early in Bell met Thomas A. Watson — , a young machinist and technician with expertise in electrical engineering. Watson became Bell's indispensable assistant and the two spent endless hours together experimenting with transmitting sound. In the summer of Bell developed the basic concept of the telephone using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the sound waves of human speech.

However, at the urging of his financial backers, who were more interested in the potential of the harmonic telegraph, Bell did not pursue the idea for several months. He resumed work on the telephone in and by September began to write the required patent specifications. Watson, come here, I want you! Soon afterwards Bell married Mabel Hubbard, his former speech student and daughter of his new partner, and sailed to England for a yearlong honeymoon.

Bell's claim to have invented the telephone was challenged in more than lawsuits. The courts eventually upheld Bell's patent, and the Bell Company's principal competitor, Western Union Telegraph, agreed to stay out of the telephone business. The Bell Company, in turn, stayed away from the telegraph. In , with the sale of the Bell Company to a group of investors, Bell's financial future was secure and he could devote the rest of his life to his work as an inventor.

Bell won France 's Volta Prize for his telephone invention and received 50, francs in prize money. With this reward he established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. Among the new devices he and his fellow scientists at the laboratory invented were the graphophone, a device for recording sound on wax cylinders or disks an advance that made Thomas Edison's — phonograph commercially viable ; the photophone, used for transmitting speech on a beam of light; a telephone probe, used in surgery until the discovery of the X-ray; an audiometer; and an induction balance for detecting metal within the human body.

Working with collaborators at the Volta Laboratory and at another scientific facility he established near Baddeck, Nova Scotia , Bell invented a prototype air conditioning system, an improved strain of sheep, an early iron lung , solar distillation of water, and the sonar detection of icebergs. The possibility of flight fascinated Bell. He built tetrahedral kites capable of carrying a human being and supported pioneering experiments in aviation.

He also designed a hydrofoil boat that set the world water speed record in Bell retained his dual interests in education of the deaf and invention throughout his later life. He became a naturalized U. He was also influential in the founding of Science magazine and the National Geographic Society.

Bell died in Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. The Chord of Steel: The Story of the Invention of the Telephone. American Inventor — Alexander Graham Bell , best known as the inventor of the telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, When he died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia , Canada, on August 2, , he was considered one of the most successful inventors of his time.

Bell's interest in communication was stimulated by unique family circumstances. Both his grandfather and father were accomplished speech experts. Having a hearing-impaired mother also made Bell conscious of the challenges of being deaf. In he began using his father's models of visible speech to teach deaf students phonetics, a career he resumed after emigrating with his family from Scotland to Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in Teaching private students supplemented his income.

One of these hearing-impaired students, Mabel Hubbard, later became his wife. Bell's passion for helping the disabled, particularly the sight- and hearing-impaired, remained with him throughout his life. Although Bell experimented throughout his childhood, it was not until he moved to Boston that his interests in inventing became serious. There he decided to work on developing the multiple telegraph, which would allow several telegraphs to be sent over the same line simultaneously instead of one at a time. He received that patent in He also became fascinated with the concept of sending varying pitches, mimicking the human voice, over a wire via undulating electrical impulses, then reconstructing the pitches at the other end of the wire.

After years of experimenting, he and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, met with success. Bell's patent application for the telephone was submitted only hours before a rival, Elisha Gray , submitted his version. In July , the Bell Telephone Company was founded. The shares were divided between Bell, Watson, and two other men. As a wedding gift, Bell gave his wife, Mabel, 5, shares of Bell Telephone Company, keeping only ten shares for himself. Bell Telephone rapidly expanded throughout the world. While these shares provided Bell with financial security, they made his wife quite wealthy. During Bell's lifetime, Mabel repeatedly provided grants to fund his research.

The photophone, which Bell invented in , worked like a telephone but used light beams instead of wire. Bell considered it one of his greatest inventions. Although the photophone's success was limited because of the lack of technology at that time, Bell's invention used the same principles as modern fiber optic telecommunications. While living in Mabel's hometown of Washington, D. Later he built a second home in Baddeck and called it Beinn Bhreagh. Much of his inventing was completed there. After winning the Volta prize of France for the telephone, Bell invested the award money in the creation of the Volta Labs at Beinn Bhreagh.

This lab produced the flat-disk record and a floating stylus to improve upon Thomas Edison's phonograph. With earnings from those patents, Bell established the Volta Bureau in , which was dedicated to advancing knowledge of the deaf. He also established the American Association for the Promotion of the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf and continued being instrumental in assisting many deaf children, including Helen Keller, to overcome their disabilities.

Bell also became interested in screening children for hearing impairment. After developing the audiometer, he was honored for his accomplishments in that field with the term used for measuring the level of audible sound: Bell's interests were not confined to matters of speech.

His father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a founding member and the first president of the National Geographic Society. When Hubbard died in , Bell accepted the presidency of the society. He then underwrote the hiring of his future son-in-law to edit the association's monthly publication. Bell influenced many trademark features of the society, including the formation of grants for research expeditions. He also encouraged the inclusion of dynamic multiple-color photographs in National Geographic Magazine.

Bell also nurtured a fascination with flight. At Beinn Bhreagh, he experimented with kites and eventually developed and patented the tetrahedron, a four-sided triangle used in his aerial experiments. From to , after the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, Bell and his associates built four airplanes. With those machines, the AEA gained patents for improving airplane designs. The AEA then sought to build a craft that could take off and land on water. In this led to the patent for the fastest watercraft of its time, the hydrofoil HD4, which reached speeds of kilometers 71 miles per hour.

In tribute to Bell's life and accomplishments, telephones across the United States were silenced for one minute during his funeral in Baddeck in Cornell University Press, National Geographic Society , Bell had a lifelong interest in teaching the deaf to speak, an interest intensified because his mother and his wife were deaf. Bell did his early telephone work in Boston and subsequently moved to Washington. He became a citizen of the United States in Bell achieved fame as inventor of the telephone and fortune under a broad interpretation given to the patent granted him 10 March His early experimental work was spurred on by a persistent belief in its ultimate commercial value, and enthusiasm unshared by his predecessor Philip Reis and his contemporary Elisha Gray.

His interest in the deaf led Bell to publish several articles on hereditary deafness. This in turn led to studies on longevity and a long-term series of experiments in which he attempted to develop a breed of sheep with more than the usual two nipples.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA

In , after twenty years of selection, he had a flock consisting solely of six-nippled sheep. He found, as he had suspected, that twin production increased with the number of nipples. Bell made a number of suggestions on the medical use of electricity but performed few experiments himself. His approach to these areas was as an amateur, although one with an active, inquiring mind.

In he used the 50, francs of the Volta Prize to establish the Volta Laboratory Association later the Volta Bureau , largely devoted to work for the deaf, in Washington. In he conceived the idea of the journal Science , which began publication in In the first eight years of its existence, Bell and his father-in-law, G.

He himself experimented with kites, and in he organized the Aerial Experimental Association, which lasted for a year and a half and was financed by his wife. Bell also helped to organize and finance the National Geographic Society , serving as its president from to Bell was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in and was appointed a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in His notebooks, letters, and other documentary material are nicely housed by the Bell family at the National Geographic Society ; some of these have been reproduced on microfilm and are available at the Library of Congress and the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Montreal.

Most of the surviving pieces of apparatus are preserved at the Smithsonian Institution. No satisfactory biography of Bell exists. Basic details can be found in W. Part of the experimental telephone work is analyzed in B. Alexander Graham Bell , —, American scientist, inventor of the telephone , b. Edinburgh, Scotland, educated at the Univ. He worked in London with his father, whose system of visible speech he used in teaching the deaf to talk. In he went to Canada, and in he lectured, chiefly to teachers of the deaf, in Boston and other cities.

During the next few years he conducted his own school of vocal physiology in Boston, lectured at Boston Univ.

• Save a Spaniel.
• Air Traffic Control Communication;
• The Guano Heiress (Case Notes in Anti-Psychiatry).

His teaching methods were of lasting value in the improvement of education for the deaf. As early as , Bell conceived the idea of transmitting speech by electric waves. In , while he was experimenting with a multiple harmonic telegraph, the principle of transmission and reproduction came to him.

The first demonstration took place before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 10, , and a more significant one, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition the same year, introduced the telephone to the world. The Bell Telephone Company was organized in July, A long period of patent litigation followed in which Bell's claims were completely upheld by the U. With the 50, francs awarded him as the Volta Prize for his invention, he established in Washington, D. Bell invented the photophone, which transmitted speech by light rays; the audiometer, another invention for the deaf; the induction balance, used to locate metallic objects in the human body; and the flat and the cylindrical wax recorders for phonographs.

He investigated the nature and causes of deafness and made an elaborate study of its heredity. In the magazine Science, which became the official organ for the American Association for the Advancement of Science , was founded largely through his influence. Bell was president of the National Geographic Society from to and was made a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in After his interest was occupied largely by aviation.

He invented the tetrahedral kite. The Aerial Experiment Association, founded under his patronage in , brought together G. Baldwin, and others, who invented the aileron principle and developed the hydroplane. See biographies by C. Johnson , E. Wesson , and T. Bell, Alexander Graham —