Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922) was an outstanding scientist, inventor, and innovator. Born in Scotland, he emigrated to Canada, and later, the United States, finally, returning to Canada, he died at his private estate on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Bell is widely acclaimed as the foremost developer of the telephone, with honourable mention to Antonio Meucci and Philipp Reis. In addition to Bell's work in telecommunications, he was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.

Biography

Alexander Graham Bell, or A. Graham Bell, as he later prefered, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. He was the middle of three children, all boys. Both brothers died of tuberculosis. At age 11, he adopted the middle name 'Graham' out of admiration for Alexander Graham, a family friend. Many called Bell "the father of the deaf." This reference may be regarded as ironic, due to his belief in the practice of eugenics, as well as his strong audist stance. With both his mother and wife deaf, he hoped to eliminate hereditary deafness.

His family was associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather in London, England, his uncle in Dublin, Ireland, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, in Edinburgh, Scotland, were all professed elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his treatise on Visible Speech, which appeared in Edinburgh, in 1868. In this treatise, he explains his methods of how to instruct deaf mutes to articulate words and read other people's lip movements to decipher meaning.

Bell was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, from which he graduated at the age of 13. At the age of 16 he secured a position as a pupil-teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy, at Elgin, Moray, Scotland. The following year he went to the University of Edinburgh. He graduated from the University College of London.

While still in Scotland, he is said to have turned his attention to the science of acoustics, with a view to ameliorate the deafness of his mother.

From 1867 to 1868, he was an instructor at Somerset College, Bath, Somerset, England.

In 1870, at the age of 23, he emigrated with his family to Canada where they settled at Brantford, Ontario, and became a Canadian citizen. Before he left Scotland, Bell had turned his attention to telephony. In Canada, he continued an interest in communication machines. He designed a piano which, by means of electricity, could transmit its music at a distance. In 1871, he accompanied his father to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where his father was employed in teaching his System of Visible Speech. Subsequently, Bell's father was invited to introduce his system into a large school for mutes at Boston, Massachusetts, United States, but he declined the post, in favor of his son. Thus, Alexander Bell became professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory.

Bell speaking into prototype model of the telephone

At Boston University he continued his research in the same field, and endeavored to produce a telephone which would not only send musical notes, but articulate speech.

Meanwhile, the Italian-American Antonio Meucci had paid for a "caveat" for the telephone since 1871. In summer 1872 Meucci asked Edward B. Grant (Vice President of American District Telegraph Co. of New York) the permission to to test his telephone apparatus on the company's telegraph lines. He gave Grant description of his prototype and a copy of his caveat. Up to 1874 Meucci had only the money to renew his caveat while looking for fundings for a true patent. After waiting two years without receiving an answer, Meucci went to Grant and asked him to be given back his documents, but Grant answered he had lost them. The same year the caveat expired, because Meucci had no more money to renew it^[1].

Bell invented his own telephone in 1875 after discovering that a receiver could also be a transmitter. On Monday February 14, 1876, Bell notarized a "caveat" to apply for a patent. The very same morning Monday February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray visited the patent office for his own work on the telephone. There is a debate about who arrived first.

Journalist Julie M. Fenster says:
"On February 14, 1876, Hubbard, the lawyer, went ahead and filed the patent application for him. The patent was issued on March 7; three days after that, Bell introduced a liquid element, containing an acid-water compound, at the transmitting end of the phone. That allowed for some resistance in the initial vibration and so a truer replication of voice tone. When he spilled some of the acid compound on himself, he cried out the immortal sentence “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” The intriguing aspect of the “Mr. Watson” incident is the conclusion to which it leads: Bell already had his patent in hand when he finally got his invention to work. That rankled some of his competitors in the race to develop a telephone, and so did the date of the original patent filing. All of a sudden, on February 14, Gardiner Hubbard was in a tremendous rush to have the patent application stamped as “received” at the patent office. He seemed preternaturally motivated. In Chicago, on that same day, Elisha Gray was sliding his patent caveat, a notice of intent to develop an invention of a particular description, across a desk in the government office. An engineer with Western Union, Gray had also developed the basic technology of telephonic communication. His patent was received a few hours later than Bell’s, however, and so it was disallowed. It was suggested in court in later proceedings that Hubbard had learned of Gray’s imminent filing and, moreover, had arranged with someone in the patent office to give Bell’s application priority no matter what else happened. For his part, Bell offered to sell the patent outright to Western Union for $100,000. The president of the company balked, countering that the telephone was nothing but a toy. Two years later, he told colleagues that if he could get the patent for $25 million he’d consider it a bargain. By then it wasn’t for sale.^[2]

With financing from his American father-in-law, on March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent Number 174,465 covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound", the telephone.

When Bell secured his own patent in 1876, Meucci took Bell to court in order to state his priority, but he lost the case since, due to a series of circumstances, he could not prove much material evidence of his inventions apart reconstructing them during the trial and calling witnesses. Some historians and researchers claim there was a miscarriage of justice also due to ethnic and social discrimination. On the initiative of the Italian American deputate Vito Fossella, with the Resolution 269 the U.S. House of Representatives recognised the work previously done by Antonio Meucci: the Resolution recognised that Meucci gave his prototypes to Western Union , which afterwards claimed they had lost them; at the same time, Meucci could not find money to renew his "caveat"; Bell worked in the same department where Meucci's prototypes were allegedly stored and later on patented the telephone as his own invention ^{[3] [4]}

To Bell's credit, he successfully fought off several lawsuits, refined the telephone, and developed it into one of the most successful products. The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886 over 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones and Bell became a millionaire.

After obtaining the patent for the telephone, Bell continued his many experiments in communication, which culminated in the invention of the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light — a precursor of today's optical fiber systems. He also worked in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. The range of Bell's inventive genius is represented only in part by the eighteen patents granted in his name alone and the twelve he shared with his collaborators. These included fourteen for the telephone and telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five for aerial vehicles, four for hydroairplanes, and two for a selenium cell.

Bell had many ideas that were later realized in inventions. During his Volta Laboratory period, Bell and his associates considered impressing a magnetic field on a record, as a means of reproducing sound. Although the trio briefly experimented with the concept, they were unable to develop a workable prototype. They abandoned the idea, never realizing they had glimpsed a basic principle which would one day find its application in the tape recorder, the hard disc and floppy disc drive, and other magnetic media.

Bell's own home used a primitive form of air conditioning, in which fans blew currents of air across great blocks of ice. He also anticipated modern concerns with fuel shortages and industrial pollution. Methane gas, he reasoned, could be produced from the waste of farms and factories. At his Canadian estate in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, he experimented with composting toilets and devices to capture water from the atmosphere. In a magazine interview published shortly before his death, he reflected on the possibility of using solar panels to heat houses.

In 1882, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 13 January 1887 the Government of the United States moves to annul the patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. The prosecuting attorney was the Hon. George M. Stearns under the direction of the Solicitor General George A. Jenks ^[5]
Bell telephone company obtained reason in the trial "The U.S. Government Versus Antonio Meucci" by a sentence on July 19th 1887 by judge William J. Wallace(Circuit Court, S. D. New York.) "The experiments and invention of one Antonio Meucci, relating to the transmission of speech by an electrical apparatus [...] do not contain any such elements of an electric speaking telephone as would give the same priority over or interfere with the said Bell patent." ^[6].
In 1888, he was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society and became its second president. He was the recipient of many honors. The French Government conferred on him the decoration of the Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honor), the Académie française bestowed on him the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs, the Royal Society of Arts in London awarded him the Albert Medal in 1902, and the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, granted him a Ph.D. He was awarded the AIEE's Edison Medal in 1914 for "For meritorious achievement in the invention of the telephone."

Bell married Mabel Hubbard, who was one of his pupils at Boston University and also a deaf-mute, on July 11, 1877. His invention of the telephone resulted from his attempts to create a device that would allow him to communicate with his wife and his deaf mother. He died of a heart attack at Beinn Bhreagh, located on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island near the village of Baddeck, in 1922 was buried atop Beinn Bhreagh mountain overlooking Bras d'Or Lake. He was survived by his wife and two of their four children.

The photophone

Another of Bell's inventions was the photophone, a device enabling the transmission of sound over a beam of light, which he developed together with Charles Sumner Tainter. The device employed light-sensitive cells of crystalline selenium, which has the property that its electrical resistance varies inversely with the illumination (i.e., the resistance is higher when the material is in the dark, and lower when it is lighted). The basic principle was to modulate a beam of light directed at a receiver made of crystalline selenium, to which a telephone was attached. The modulation was done either by means of a vibrating mirror, or a rotating disk periodically obscuring the light beam.

This idea was by no means new. Selenium had been discovered by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1817, and the peculiar properties of crystalline or granulate selenium were discovered by Willoughby Smith in 1873. In 1878, one writer with the initials J.F.W. from Kew an arrangement in Nature in a column appearing on June 13, asking the readers whether any experiments in that direction had already been done. In his paper on the photophone, Bell credited one A. C. Browne of London with the independent discovery in 1878—the same year Bell became aware of the idea. Bell and Tainter, however, were apparently the first to perform a successful experiment, by no means any easy task, as they even had to produce the selenium cells with the desired resistance characteristics themselves.

In one experiment in Washington, D.C. the sender and the receiver were placed on different buildings some 700 feet (213 metres) apart. The sender consisted of a mirror directing sunlight onto the mouthpiece, where the light beam was modulated by a vibrating mirror, focused by a lens and directed at the receiver, which was simply a parabolic reflector with the selenium cells in the focus and the telephone attached. With this setup, Bell and Tainter succeeded to communicate clearly.

The photophone was patented on December 18 1880, but the quality of communication remained poor and the research was not pursued by Bell. Later on this helped in the discovery of fiber optics and laser communication systems.

Metal detector

Bell is also credited with the invention of the metal detector in 1881. The device was hurriedly put together in an attempt to find the bullet in the body of U.S. President James Garfield. The metal detector worked, but didn't find the bullet because the metal bed frame the President was lying on confused the instrument. Bell gave a full account of his experiments in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1882. Though unsuccessful in its first incarnation, this achievement would eventually change the nature of physical security.

The hydrofoil

The March 1906 Scientific American article by American hydrofoil pioneer William E. Meacham explained the basic principle of hydrofoils. Bell considered the invention of the hydroplane as a very significant achievement. Based on information gained from that article he began to sketch concepts of what is now called a hydrofoil boat.

Bell and Casey Baldwin began hydrofoil experimentation in the summer of 1908 as a possible aid to airplane takeoff from water. Baldwin studied the work of the Italian inventor Enrico Forlanini and began testing models. This led him and Bell to the development of practical hydrofoil watercraft.

During his world tour of 1910–1911 Bell and Baldwin met with Forlanini in France. They had rides in the Forlanini hydrofoil boat over Lake Maggiore. Baldwin described it as being as smooth as flying. On returning to Baddeck a number of designs were tried culminating in the HD-4, using Renault engines. A top speed of 54 miles per hour was achieved, with rapid acceleration, good stability and steering, and the ability to take waves without difficulty.In 1913, Dr. Bell hired Walter Pinaud, a Sydney yacht designer and builder as well as the proprietor of Pinaud's Yacht Yard in Westmount, Nova Scotia to work on the pontoons of the HD-4. Pinaud soon took over the boatyard at Bell Laboratories on Beinn Bhreagh, Bell's estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Pinaud's experience in boatbuilding enabled him to make useful design changes to the HD-4 however soon WWI intervened. After WWI work began again on the HD-4. Bell's report to the navy permitted him to obtain two 350 horsepower (260 kW) engines in July 1919. On September 9 1919 the HD-4 set a world's marine speed record of 70.86 miles per hour.

Aeronautics

Bell was a supporter of aerospace engineering research through the Aerial Experiment Association, officially formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia in October 1907 at the suggestion of Mrs. Mabel Bell and with her financial support. It was headed by the inventor himself. The founding members were four young men, American Glenn H. Curtiss, a motorcycle manufacturer who would later be awarded the Scientific American Trophy for the first official one-kilometre flight in the Western hemisphere and later be world-renowned as an airplane manufacturer; Frederick W. "Casey" Baldwin, the first Canadian and first British subject to pilot a public flight in Hammondsport, New York; J.A.D. McCurdy; and Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, an official observer from the U.S. government. One of the project's inventions, the aileron, is a standard component of aircraft today. (The aileron was also invented independently by Robert Esnault-Pelterie.)

Bell experimented with box kites and wings constructed of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in silk. The tetrahedral wings were named Cygnet I, II and III, and were flown both unmanned and manned (Cygnet I crashed during a flight carrying Selfridge) in the period from 1907-1912. Some of Bell's kites are on display at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.

Other Inventions

Bell had made many other inventions in his life. They include the metal jacket that assists in breathing, the audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, a device that locates icebergs, investigated on how to separate salt from seawater, and also worked on finding alternative fuels.

Eugenics

Along with many very prominent thinkers and scientists of the time, Bell was connected with the eugenics movement in the United States. From 1912 until 1918 he was the chairman of the board of scientific advisors to the Eugenics Record Office associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and regularly attended meetings. In 1921 he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics held under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Organizations such as these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a "defective variety of the human race." By the late 1930s about half the states in the US had eugenics laws, the California laws being used as a model for eugenics laws in Nazi Germany.

His ideas about people he considered defective centered on the deaf. This was due to his feelings for his deaf family and his contact with deaf education. In addition to advocating sterilization of the deaf, Bell wished to prohibit deaf teachers from being allowed to teach in schools for the deaf, he worked to outlaw the marriage of deaf individuals to one another, and he was an ardent supporter of oralism over sign language. His avowed goal was to eradicate the language and culture of the deaf so as to force them to assimilate into the hearing culture, for their own long-term benefit, and, for the benefit of society at large. Although this attitude is widely seen as paternalistic and arrogant today, it was mainstream in that era. See also: audism.

Although he supported what many would consider harsh and inhumane policies today, he was not unkind to deaf individuals who supported his theories of oralism. He was a personal and longtime friend of Helen Keller (although she hated being deaf), and his wife Mabel was deaf, though none of their children were. Bell was known as a kindly father and loving family man who took great pleasure in playing with his many grandchildren.

Tributes

In the early 1970s, UK rock group The Sweet recorded a tribute to Bell and the telephone, suitably titled "Alexander Graham Bell". The song gives a fictional account of the invention, in which Bell devises the telephone so he can talk to his girlfriend who lives on the other side of the United States. The song reached the top 40 in the UK and went on to sell over one million recordings world-wide.

Another musical tribute to Bell was written by the British songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson. The chorus of Thompson's song reminds the listener that "of course there was the telephone, he'd be famous for that alone, but there's fifty other things as well from Alexander Graham Bell". The song mentions Bell's work with discs rather than cylinders, the hydrofoil, Bell's work with the deaf, his invention of the respirator and several other of Bell's achievements.

Bell was honored on the television programs the 100 Greatest Britons (2002), the top-ten Greatest Canadians (2004), and the 100 Greatest Americans (2005). The nominees and rankings for these programs were determined by popular vote. Bell was the only person to be on more than one of the programs.

There is also a school located in Ajax, Ontario, Canada called Alexander Graham Bell Public School. One of the residence halls at Rochester Institute of Technology adjacent to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf building is Alexander Graham Bell Hall.

See also

• Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
• Emile Berliner
• Charles Bourseul
• Thomas Edison
• Elisha Gray
• Innocenzo Manzetti
• Antonio Meucci
• Philipp Reis

References

1. ↑ Catania Basilio 2003 Antonio Meucci inventore del telefono, Notiziario Tecnico Telecom Italia, anno 12 n.1, dicembre 2003, pp. 114]
2. ↑ [Fenster Julie M., 2006, Inventing the Telephone—And Triggering All-Out Patent War, AmericanHeritage.com
3. ↑ Vito Fossella's Press Release on Resolution 269
4. ↑ Original material about Meucci's work and his trial against Bell can be found here: Basilio Catania's Work on Antonio Meucci, Federazione Italiana di Elettrotecnica Museo Antonio Meucci
5. ↑ Basilio Catania 2003 The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell. An important acknowledgment for Antonio Meucci
6. ↑ Globe Telephone Company 1884 - Famous ATT Patent Fight © 1996 - 2007 Scripophily .com

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Alexander Graham Bell Institute
• Bell Homestead - Brantford, Ontario
• Bell Homestead, National Historic Site
• Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site. Museum located in Baddeck, Nova Scotia containing many of Bell's experiments and models.
• Alexander Graham Bell family papers Online version at the Library of Congress comprises a selection of 4,695 items (totaling about 51,500 images) containing correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, his family life, his interest in the education of the deaf, and his aeronautical and other scientific failures.
• Bell's path to the invention of the telephone
• Bell's speech before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on August 27, 1880, presenting the photophone. Very clear description. Published as "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light" in the American Journal of Sciences, Third Series, vol. XX, #118, October 1880, pp. 305 - 324; and as "Selenium and the Photophone" in Nature, September 1880.
• AlexanderBell.com - Telecom pioneer
• Alexander Graham Bell gravesite
• Alexander Graham Bell: Biography and Much More from Answers.com Excellent summary of Alexander Graham Bell's life, has many useful dates for important parts of his life
• Federazione Italiana di Elettrotecnica, museum on Antonio Meucci (in Italian) Original material about Antonio Meucci's work and the trial against Alexander Graham Bell.
• Basilio Catania's publishing about the Meucci/Bell case
• Basilio Catania "Antonio Meucci una vita per la scienza e per l'Italia, vol.1 (in Italian), summary of Meucci's life and work and his trial against Alexander Graham Bell.
• Basilio Catania "Antonio Meucci una vita per la scienza e per l'Italia, vol.2(in Italian), summary of Meucci's life and work and his trial against Alexander Graham Bell.
• Basilio Catania 2003 The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell. An important acknowledgment for Antonio Meucci

Patents

• Complete list of Bell patents

US patent images in TIFF format

• U.S. Patent 0161,739 Improvement in Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs, filed March 1875, issued April 1875 (multiplexing signals on a single wire)
• U.S. Patent 0174,465 Improvement in Telegraphy, filed February 14, 1876, issued March 7, 1876 (Bell's first telephone patent)
• U.S. Patent 0178,399 Improvement in Telephonic Telegraph Receivers, filed April 1876, issued June 1876
• U.S. Patent 0181,553 Improvement in Generating Electric Currents (using rotating permanent magnets), filed August 1876, issued August 1876
• U.S. Patent 0235,199 Apparatus for Signalling and Communicating, called Photophone, filed August 1880, issued December 1880
• U.S. Patent 0757,012 Aerial Vehicle, filed June 1903, issued April 1904