Bell and His Legacy
It is such a common occurrence that no one ever wonders from whence it came. But the telephone has a fascinating story behind it, one that could be entitled "The Conquest of Solitude." It is the story of Alexander Graham Bell.
He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, the son of a man who was consumed, passionately consumed, with the workings of the human voice—how it is produced and used, and especially in teaching the deaf how to use it. For in those days, the deaf lived in permanent solitude. Not only could they not hear, they could not speak. Perhaps this obsession of the elder Bell was one of the reasons he married whom he did. For the woman who would give birth to the inventor of the telephone was deaf!
Young Alexander Graham Bell grew up with his father's passions. In 1870, due to poor health, he migrated to Canada. His success in teaching the deaf to speak soon brought him to the attention of a wealthy Boston merchant who had a deaf daughter, Mabel. Bell agreed to teach Mabel, and they fell in love. She inspired him through exhausting experiments and supported him through periods of depression as he developed the remarkable instrument that transformed speech into electrical impulses and back into human speech at the end of a wire. He had pierced another solitude—the one that had denied speech between distant people. They married in 1877, and he later became an American citizen.
Alexander Graham Bell was showered with praise and honors from around the world. While he made other discoveries, he was most proud of his efforts to help the deaf. When the French government awarded him the Volta Prize for inventing the telephone, he used the monetary award, combined with proceeds from another patent, to establish the Volta Bureau in Washington, D.C., to fund research on deafness. Today, it is called the Alexander Graham Bell Association, providing the latest information to help the deaf cope with their disability.
Bell died in 1922; Mabel followed five months later. His name endures as a constant reminder of how he brought humanity into closer touch.
The first voice transmitted over a wire surprised even its inventor. One night in 1876, while experimenting, Bell accidentally succeeded in sending a message to his assistant in the next room. That night marked the start of a communications revolution.
Initially, two iron wires connected each pair of telephones. Switchboards centralized connections. Later inventions like the vacuum tube to amplify sound and coaxial cables for long-distance links greatly expanded service. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and by the 1960s, communications satellites eliminated the need for landlines. Today, bundles of glass fibers carry calls on laser beams of light.
Many of these inventions, including sound motion pictures and stereo recording, along with thousands of other patents, came from AT&T Bell Laboratories, founded in 1925. As we move forward, even greater flexibility in telecommunications is expected.
It is hard to imagine a world without the telephone. Our lives depend on computers linked to phone lines for shopping, banking, and daily work. Electronic mail arrives via telephone lines, allowing instant, effortless communication.