ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: BIOGRAPHY, INVENTIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS - ARTE - 2024

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922), was an inventor, scientist and engineer of British and American nationality born in Scotland. He is popularly known for his contributions to communications after the creation of his telephone, which obtained the first patent in the United States.

Following his childhood in the UK, he and his family emigrated to Canada. He subsequently got job offers that took him to the United States, where he spent most of his professional career.

Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell, by Moffett Studio, via Wikimedia Commons.

For years there has been a conflict as to who to credit the true invention of the telephone, since many claimed to be authors of similar artifacts prior to the registration of the Bell apparatus in 1876, as is the case of Antonio Meucci.

However, by owning the first patent, Alexander Graham Bell was able to exploit the nascent industry that spread personal communications and gave way to other great technological advances. He also contributed to other areas such as aviation and developed some ships.

Important data

There was a great personal motivation for Bell to dedicate himself to the study of sound, since both his mother and his wife suffered from deafness. In fact, during his youth he devoted himself to instructing hearing impaired individuals in speech.

This reason also led him to become interested in the creation of devices that collaborate with the improvement in hearing, such as headphones aimed at increasing the quality of life of the disabled in these cases.

Alexander Graham Bell created an organization to research and promote the teaching of the deaf, always being ready to collaborate with this group.

In 1880 he was awarded the Volta Prize and used the amount received by it to found a homonymous laboratory in Washington dedicated to researching both electricity and sound, as well as other branches of different sciences.

He appeared as one of the founders of the National Geographic Society during 1888, where he served as president for several years.

Biography

Early years

Alexander Bell came to the world in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland on March 3, 1847. His Christian name was assigned to him to pay homage to his paternal grandfather.

The middle name "Graham" was chosen by himself when he was 11 years old in order to distinguish himself from other members of his family.

He was the second son of Alexander Melville Bell with Eliza Grace Symonds. He had two brothers: the eldest was named Melville after his father and the youngest was named Robert. Both died in youth from tuberculosis.

Alexander's father was teaching elocution at the University of Edinburgh. He was also the author of various methods and books that sold very well and made him famous in Britain and the United States.

The speech was a family business, since Alexander Bell, grandfather of the future inventor, was the one who had started working in that branch. After training as an actor, he decided to dedicate himself to instruction in elocution, in addition to helping people with speech problems such as stuttering.

Eliza, his mother, despite being deaf, had achieved a certain reputation as a pianist. In the same way she dedicated herself to other artistic activities such as painting.

Education

Young Alexander Graham Bell and his siblings were homeschooled for the first few years of their life.

His mother was the one who took the reins of the instruction of the boys, who learned the first letters, as well as artistic activities among which they included reading music or learning to play the piano.

His family in general had a great intellectual influence on the boy during his early years. In addition, Edinburgh was said to be the city most committed to the intelligentsia in Scotland at the time.

Musical fever

Eliza felt that Alexander had a special talent for music, so she decided to hire a private teacher to help the boy develop that potential.

Auguste Benoit Bertini was in charge of teaching music to the young Bell and believed that the boy could advance quickly if he decided to choose that specialty as a career. After the death of the professor, Alexander Graham did not want to continue studying and left music behind.

Sound and its diffusion

Bell and his mother had a very special and close relationship. Due to her condition, she had to use a listening device that consisted of a mouthpiece with a kind of cone whose thin part was in the ear and whoever wanted to talk to Eliza had to shout at the wide end.

Alexander Graham discovered that if he spoke softly on his mother's forehead she could understand what he was saying and that was one of the incentives he had to study sound, something that remained his priority for years.

Curious young man

The Bells owned a country house where children had the freedom to play as much as they wanted in nature. This aroused great interest in Alexander Graham, who liked to study both animals and plants, of which he had a collection.

One of his most interesting anecdotes of the time is that when he was 12 years old he devised, together with a friend, a device with rolling pedals and brushes with which he could clean wheat quickly and easily. That was his first invention and perhaps the incentive to continue developing other ideas.

From young problem to model

At the age of 11 Alexander Graham Bell entered the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He did not perform well there, since he seemed not interested in the academic curriculum or the methods used.

He was a student of that institution for four years, but only managed to pass a single course that was necessary to graduate. After that period he gave up his studies and was sent to the house of his grandfather, Alexander Bell, who was settled in London.

There the young man rediscovered his interest in learning thanks to the arduous effort made by his grandfather, who continued to teach it at home and trained him to dedicate himself to the instruction of oratory, in addition to other topics related to speech.

That was why at the age of 16 he managed to get a position as a teacher-student at the Weston House Academy, where he learned Latin and Greek, while teaching elocution. In addition, she received a good salary for a young man her age.

In 1867 he managed to enter the University of Edinburgh, where Edward Bell was studying. But his brother died of tuberculosis shortly after, and Alexander Graham moved home.

Last years in England

The Bells had left Scotland and were in London, and as a result Alexander Graham Bell enrolled at the University College of London. He began to study there in 1868, but did not complete his studies at that institution.

In 1870, a recently married Melville Bell, his older brother, died of tuberculosis. That caused the Bell family to panic, especially Alexander's parents, who did not want to lose their last living child.

Canada

The Bells, along with Melville's widow, set out on a journey that took them to Canada in 1870 at the invitation of a family friend who wished to host them for a time in Paris, Ontario.

They all agreed that it would be profitable and safe to change the environment to one that is healthier and more spacious than those found in the Old Continent.

They were soon delighted with the area and decided to purchase a farm in Tutelo Heights, Ontario. That became the family's new home and Alexander Graham, who had been in poor health, soon recovered thanks to the pleasant weather.

He adapted a space on the farm to serve as his workshop and laboratory. By this time he had developed a great interest in Helmholtz's work on electricity and sound. That led him to develop various theories and experiments related to those areas.

The following year (1871), Alexander Melville was offered a teaching position in the system he devised known as "Visible Speech" in Montreal. At the same time they invited him to Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States on behalf of the Boston School for the Deaf-Mutes, since they wanted to instruct their teachers in the "Visible Speech."

However, Melville decided to reject that proposal, but not without proposing his son Alexander as a facilitator. The idea was well received at the institution.

U.S

After Alexander Graham Bell traveled to Massachusetts to give courses to teachers at the Boston School, he then went to the American Asylum for the Deaf-Dumb in Connecticut.

From there, Bell went to the Clarke School for the Deaf, also located in Massachusetts. At that point he met someone who was very important in his life, his future partner and father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard.

He spent six months in the United States of America and then returned to Ontario, Canada to his parents' home.

Some time later he decided to return to Boston and settle there with the exercise of the same profession as his father and a private practice, to take advantage of the fact that he had created an important reputation in that city.

He established his practice and in 1872 opened the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Discourse. This Bell-run institution became extremely popular and had 30 students during its first year.

That same year he began to work as a professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the School of Speech at Boston University.

Full time inventor

Bell had continued his investigations of electricity and sound between his parents' home in Canada and their residence in the United States, but he was very jealous of his notes and feared that they would be discovered by someone with malicious intent.

During 1873 he felt the need to withdraw from his professional practice and concentrate on the experimental projects he was working on for a time.

He kept only two students: George Sanders, son of a millionaire merchant who offered him accommodation and space for his laboratory; and a young woman named Mabel Hubbard, daughter of the owner of the Clarke School for the Deaf. This girl had suffered from scarlet fever as a child and this impaired her hearing. During that same year Mabel began working with Bell.

Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell's first creation in this direction was what he christened the harmonic telegraph.

After experimenting with the phonoautograph, Bell thought that he could make rippling electrical currents turn into sounds with the use of metal rods at different frequencies.

Thus he got the idea that it was possible to send different messages over a single telegraph line if he placed them on different frequencies. After raising this idea with his friends Hubbard and Sanders, they were immediately interested and funded his research.

In 1874 he hired Thomas Watson as an assistant. A year later he had developed what he called the “acoustic telegraph” or “harmonic”, his first step towards the development of the telephone.

Patent controversy

When the apparatus was ready he applied for a patent in Great Britain. Since there these patents were only granted if it was the first place in the world in which it was registered, once it was assigned, it went to the United States Patent Office in Washington.

On February 14, 1876, a patent was applied for in the name of Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone. Hours later, Elisha Gray showed up to introduce an invention very similar to Bell's.

Finally, on March 7, 1876, Bell was granted the patent for the telephone. Three days later he made the first phone call to Watson in which he spoke a few words that went down in history: “Mr. Watson, come on. I want to see it".

Although at that time he used a system similar to that presented by Gray, he never used it later, but continued to develop his idea of ​​the electromagnetic telephone.

The lawsuits over the patent were won by Bell, who had presented the idea of ​​transmission in liquid media (mercury) a year before Gray, who made use of water.

Public demonstrations

In August 1876 Alexander Graham Bell conducted tests in Brantford, Ontario, in which he exhibited to the public his apparatus that transmitted sounds over long distances through a cable.

At the time, Bell and his partners Hubbard and Sanders tried to sell the patent to Western Union for $ 100,000, but the company declined the offer as it deemed it a mere toy.

Then the owner of Western Union repented and tried to get her with a $ 25,000,000 offer that was not accepted by Bell's company.

Since that time, many more demonstrations have been carried out before the general public, as well as in front of groups of scientists. But the real buzz about the phone was unleashed during the 1876 Philadelphia World's Fair. Since then it has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Pedro II from Brazil was present at the Philadelphia demonstration and was delighted with the apparatus. Bell then brought him to Queen Victoria of England, who was also in awe of the new creation.

Commercial success

All the comments and interest that were generated around the telephone allowed the three partners to create the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 and, although the success was not immediate, it was soon.

As much Alexander Graham Bell, like Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard conserved a third of the actions of the company that revolutionized the communications of the world.

In 1879 they bought from Western Union the patent for the carbon microphone created by Thomas Edison and with that they were able to improve the device. One of the significant improvements was the ability to increase the distance that they could communicate clearly over the phone.

The invention was a massive success and by 1886 more than 150,000 users had telephone service in the United States of North America alone.

Marriage

Shortly after the creation of the Bell Telephone Company, Alexander Graham married Mabel Hubbard, the daughter of his partner and friend Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Although she was ten years younger than him, they fell in love shortly after meeting.

She was deaf, something that motivated Bell to continue his research to collaborate with people with hearing impairment and prompted several of his inventions.

He had started courting her long ago, but he did not want to formalize their relationship until he could offer his future wife and family that he wanted to start a suitable future, especially financially.

They had four children: the first was Elsie May Bell, born in 1878. She was followed by Marian Hubbard Bell in 1880. They also had two boys named Edward (1881) and Robert (1883), but both died in infancy.

In 1882 Alexander Graham Bell became a naturalized American. After a vacation in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1885, Bell acquired land there and built a house equipped with a laboratory.

Although the Bells adored this new property, their permanent residence was in Washington for several years, especially because of the work of Alexander Graham and the constant conflicts over his intellectual property in that state.

Legal issues

Not everything was calm in the life of Alexander Graham Bell, throughout his life he had to face lawsuits concerning the intellectual authorship of his inventions. He received more than 580 patent lawsuits for the phone.

He won all the cases that were brought to trial. One of the most important conflicts was that of Antonio Meucci, who claimed that in 1834 he had a telephone that worked in Italy. However, it did not have sufficient evidence to support it and its prototypes were lost.

The North American Congress issued a resolution in 2002 recognizing the Italian as the inventor of the telephone. Despite that, Meucci's work has not been proven to have influenced the creation of Alexander Graham Bell.

The Siemens & Halske company, in Germany, took advantage of the fact that Bell had not introduced a patent in that nation and created their own with which they manufactured phones practically the same as those produced by the Bell company.

Other interests

In 1880 the French State awarded Alexander Graham Bell the Volta Prize for his contributions to the sciences of electricity. With the money he received, the inventor decided to found the Volta Laboratory in which they conducted research on both electricity and acoustics.

In the 1890s Bell became interested in the study of aeronautics. He experimented with different propellers and in 1907 founded the Experimental Air Association.

Last years

Bell remained very involved in the scientific environment and was one of the characters that prompted the birth of two of the great periodicals in this branch that maintain their status to this day.

First of all, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, specifically the journal Science.

Likewise, he was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society, which was created in 1897. Alexander Graham Bell also presided over this institution between 1898 and 1903. At that time he promoted the second publication with which he was involved: the National Geographic magazine.

Bell took advantage of his later years to collaborate with the hearing impaired community and in 1890 founded the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf.

Death

Alexander Graham Bell passed away on August 2, 1922 in Nova Scotia, Canada. He was 75 years old and the cause of his death was a complication related to diabetes that he suffered for years. He also suffered from anemia.

His wife asked those who attended Bell's funeral not to do so in mourning clothes, since she considered it better to celebrate his life.

The inventor was buried at Beinn Breagh, his home in Canada. While the funeral honors were being performed, the entire phone system was shut down for a moment to honor the man who made it possible.

Inventions

- The wheat husker

At 11 years old, still in his time in Edinburgh, a young Alexander Graham Bell spent time playing with his friend Ben Herdman in the wheat mill of his father, who, tired of the disorder caused by the young people, told them to do something useful in the place.

After briefly studying the process used to make flour, Bell thought that he could find a more efficient method of husking wheat. He experimented with some wheat and found that after tapping and brushing it he could easily separate the husk.

With the miller's approval, the boy modified a machine that had a rotary paddle system and added strong bristle brushes used to groom fingernails. The dehuller worked and kept operating in the mill for a couple of decades.

- The multiple telegraph

In 1874 the telegraph was, along with the postal mail, the preferred distance communication medium for the public.

However, this success highlighted its main shortcoming: as only one message could be transmitted on each line at a time, it was necessary to have many cables entering and leaving each telegraph station.

The telegraph monopoly company, Western Union, partly solved this problem thanks to an Edison design that succeeded in combining four messages on the same thread by using different levels of electrical potential.

Graham Bell made use of his knowledge of the nature of sound and the behavior of harmonics, and carried out experiments where telegraph signals were encoded not at different potentials but at different frequencies, in what he called the harmonic telegraph.

The inventor secured funding from Gardiner Green Hubbard to develop the idea. However, he did not tell her that together with the electrician Thomas Watson they had begun to explore the idea of ​​transmitting speech and not just simple tones.

- The microphone

By the middle of 1875, Bell and Watson had already shown that variations of electrical current in a wire could be obtained using different tones; Now they only needed a device that would convert sound waves into electric current and another that would carry out the opposite process.

They experimented with a metal rod located near an electromagnet. Said rod vibrated with the sound waves which created a variable current in the coil of the device which was transmitted to the receiver where it made another rod vibrate.

Although they found a poor quality in the sound that was received, that worked as a proof of concept for them to apply for a patent in the United Kingdom.

- The phone

Other inventors had been working on sound transducers. Elisha Gray had succeeded in outperforming Bell's design by using a diaphragm with a semi-immersed metal needle in a dilute acidic solution.

When the membrane of the microphone was affected by sound waves, a variable current was produced in the device.

After obtaining the patent, Bell and Watson experimented with a variation of Gray's transducer design, allowing them to make the first telephone transmission on March 10, 1876.

For his part, Gray claimed that the rights to the patent should be his, since he had made the application on February 14. However, that same morning Alexander Graham Bell's lawyer had filed the request of his client, before Gray.

However, Bell's modifications to Gray's system, and his previous proof-of-concept patent, made Bell's patent prevail.

Exhibitions

After that first successful test, Bell continued to work on his phone and by developing a prototype whose quality was good enough, he began to advertise his device.

He did a telephone demonstration with a line between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada. The distance between the devices was about 12 kilometers.

Later that year, he was featured at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, where he showed the phone to personalities around the world. Pedro II of Brazil is said to have exclaimed "By God, the device speaks!"

In 1877, Bell and the investors who accompanied him offered the patent to Western Union for the sum of one hundred thousand US dollars, but company executives saw only a passing toy in the creation of Bell.

Bell then decided to found the Bell Telephone Company, later AT&T, which in 1879 acquired the patent for the carbon microphone from Edison, in possession of Western Union.

In 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental call. The inventor was at AT & T's offices in New York, while Watson was in San Francisco. It was a conversation between two men separated by more than five thousand kilometers.

Other contributions

- Volta Laboratory Association

Using the resources obtained from the Volta Prize awarded by the French Government, Alexander Graham Bell, together with Chichester A. Bell and Sumner Tainter, created the Volta Laboratory Association in Georgetown, United States.

This place was mainly dedicated to research in sound analysis, recording and transmission. Interesting projects were carried out by Bell at this institution. For example, the photophone was a device that allowed the wireless transmission of sound using light.

It highlights the fact that this was tested more than 15 years before Marconi's radio appeared. Bell considered it to be his greatest invention, even more than the telephone.

Another project was the graphophone, which was a modification of Edison's phonograph that instead of recording on sheets of brass, it did so on wax. To reproduce the recordings a jet of pressurized air was used focused on the grooves and the vibration of the air created sounds.

Wax recordings recently discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Museum contain the only known records of the inventor's voice and that of his father.

Some other research by the institution in the field of graphophones was a magnetic recording method in which a magnetizable ink was used instead of grooves. There were also patents for a waxed tape recording / playback system.

The patents for the graphophone obtained by the association passed to the Volta Graphophone Company, which over the years became modern Columbia Records.

Other research areas

Also at the Volta Laboratory they dabbled in medicine, where they tried to create a precursor to the iron lung, called a vacuum jacket.

And when in 1881 there was the attack on Andrew Garfield, president of the USA, they tried to develop an induction balance, basically a metal detector, to locate the bullet and extract it.

Despite not being successful on that occasion, in later years they managed to perfect the design of the induction balance and thanks to that invention many lives were saved during World War I.

They also developed the first audiometer, a device used to measure human hearing acuity.

During the development of this creation, a unit was needed to measure the intensity of sound and they agreed to call it bel, with symbol B, in honor of Alexander Graham Bell.

- Aeronautics

At the end of the 19th century, Bell's interests had turned to aeronautics and in 1907, in Canada, he founded the Air Experimental Association with his wife.

Partners in the company were John Alexander Douglas, Frederick Walker Baldwin, and other engineers such as engine builder Glenn H. Curtiss.

The first non-motorized experimental aircraft was the Cygnet I, which in December 1907 managed to reach an altitude of 51 meters and remained in the air for seven minutes.

In July of the following year, the June Bug aircraft reached the 1km mark, being the longest flight recorded until then and for which they won the first aeronautical prize awarded in the United States.

In early 1909 they made the first powered flight in Canada. Douglas piloted the Silver Dart at Baddeck, but that same year the association disintegrated.

- Hydrofoils

Bell and Baldwin had begun work on the design of hydrofoils, or hydrodomes as they called them, which consisted of watercraft that were raised above the water by means of hydrodynamic fins.

One of the first prototypes was the HD-4 with which they achieved a speed of 87km / h and the ship had good stability and maneuverability.

In 1913 they enlisted the help of Australian yacht manufacturer Walter Pinaud, who used his experience to make modifications to the HD-4. In 1919 they achieved the 114km / h speed mark, a record that remained unbeaten for a decade.

Recognitions and honors

- He was appointed Honorary Chief of the Mohawk tribe for translating their unwritten language to the Visible Speech system, around 1870.

- President of the National Association of Teachers for the Deaf, 1874.

- Obtained membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1877.

- First prize at the Third World's Fair in Paris, shared with Elisha Gray, for the invention of the telephone, 1878.

- The National Deaf-Mute College, now Gallaudet College, awarded him a Ph.D. in 1880.

- Recipient of the Volta Prize awarded by France for his contributions to the studies of electricity, this honor came with a cash portion of about $ 10,000, 1880.

- Officer of the French Legion of Honor, 1881.

- Member of the American Philosophical Society, 1882.

- Member of the National Academy of Sciences, 1883.

- Elected vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1884) and president (1891).

- Elected president of the National Geographic Society (1898 - 1903).

- The Washington Academy of Sciences chose Bell as president, around 1900.

- Made the first ceremonial transcontinental call in 1915 together with Thomas Watson.

- The Alexander Graham Bell School opened in 1917 in Chicago.

- Awarded the Freedom of The City Award from the city of Edinburgh.

Medals

- The telephone obtained the Gold Medal for Electrical Equipment, in the World's Fair in Philadelphia in 1876.

- Recipient of the first Royal Albert Medal of the Society of the Arts of London, 1878.

- Recipient of the John Fritz Medal of the American Association of Engineering Societies, 1907.

- Recipient of the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, 1912.

- Received the David Edward Hughes Medal from the Royal Society, 1913.

- He obtained the Thomas Alva Edison Medal in 1914, it was awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

- He was awarded the Karl Koenig von Württemberg Gold Medal.

Other distinctions

- The United States Patent Office named him the largest Inventor in the country (1936).

- The units of measurement bel and decibel were named in his honor.

- Member of the Great Americans Hall of Fame, 1950.

- Canada created the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, where a museum with the inventor's name is located, 1952.

- There is a lunar crater called Bell by the International Astronomical Union, named in 1970.

- Member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1974.

- In 1976 the Alexander Graham Bell Medal was created in his honor, which is awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

- The Toronto Walk of Fame in Ontario awarded Bell a special star in the “Innovators” category.

Honorary titles

Alexander Graham Bell obtained different degrees and doctorates during his life:

- University of Würzburg, Bavaria, awarded him a Ph.D. honorary in 1882.

- Rupert Charles University of Heidelberg, in Germany awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Medicine, 1883.

- Harvard University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws, (1896).

- Illinois College gave him an honorary Juris Doctor, (1896).

- University of St. Andrew awarded him a Ph.D. in 1902.

- University of Edinburgh awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws, (1906).

- Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Science, 1906.

- Queen's University of Kingston, Ontario awarded him an honorary Juris Doctor, 1909.

- George Washington University awarded him an honorary degree, 1913.

- Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary Juris Doctorate, 1913.

- Amherst College awarded him an honorary Juris Doctor of Laws.

References

1. En.wikipedia.org. (2020). Alexander Graham Bell. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
2. Carson, M. (2007). Alexander Graham Bell. New York: Sterling.
3. Hochfelder, D. (2020). Alexander Graham Bell - Biography, Inventions, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: britannica.com.
4. Phillipson, Donald Jc. Alexander Graham Bell. The Canadian Encyclopedia, May 30, 2019, Historica Canada. Available at: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca.
5. The Library of Congress. (2020). Article by Alexander Graham Bell, 1910. Available at: loc.gov.