Canadian Inventions – The Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell is commonly regarded as one of the most influential figures of the modern world. He was a prolific inventor who contributed to a variety of industries during his life, only a fraction of which are represented in the 30 patents he was granted. Bell was involved with technologies as diverse as aeronautics, hydrofoils, photovoltaic cells, optical communications, alternate fuels, water desalination and medical devices. However, he is most widely associated with the invention of the telephone in 1876. Born in Edinburgh in 1847, Bell was raised in a family of elocutionists. His father, uncle, grandfather and brother were all involved with forms of speech therapy, circumstances that cultivated Bell’s preoccupation with acoustics. The young inventor was also profoundly influenced by his mother’s gradual loss of hearing which began when he was 12. Bell initially experimented with the transmission of sound generated by resonating tuning forks, conducting experiments that closely resembled the work of Herman von Helmholtz. When Bell became aware of Helmholtz’ work he quickly set about translating the German scientist’s book. Helmholtz used resonators to mimic vowel sounds, relying on electrical stimulation to excite the resonators. Bell mistook the electrical motors responsible for vibrating the resonators to be transmitters, incorrectly thinking that Helmholtz had converted the vibrations to electrical current that transmitted the vowel sounds through a wire. Based on his misunderstanding, Bell came to an important conclusion:

"Without knowing much about the subject, it seemed to me that if vowel sounds could be produced by electrical means, so could consonants, so could articulate speech.” Later remarking, “I thought that Helmhotz had done it ... and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It was a valuable blunder ... If I had been able to read German in those days, I might never have commenced my experiments!"

In 1870 Bell moved to Brantford, Ontario with his family. For the next decade Bell divided his time between the family home in Canada and Boston University, where he worked in the School of Oratory (eventually being made professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution). It was during this period that Bell began working with the deaf. His private practice distracted him from his experiments, but introduced him to his future wife, as well as to financial backers. In 1873 Bell decided to abandon his lucrative practice to concentrate on his acoustic transmission work. His experiments had evolved to mimic recent developments in harmonic telegraphy, which enabled multiple telegraphs to be simultaneously transmitted through the same wire. During one of his experiments, the harmonic telegraph Bell was using malfunctioned. Believing that one of the vibrating steel reeds in the receiver (used to convert the transmitted signal into an audible tone) had become stuck to the pole of the receiver magnet, Bell asked his assistant, Thomas Watson, to pluck the reed. To his astonishment, Bell heard the corresponding reed in the transmitter vibrate with the same timbre as the plucked reed, but without the interrupted current that was responsible for transmitting telegraphs. Bell soon concluded that the induced undulating current created by the reed vibrating in the receiver’s electromagnetic field was responsible for the transmission, and that the same undulating current could transmit the complex vibrations of speech. Bell continued to refine his experiments. He soon adopted a skin diaphragm connected to a magnetic armature in place of the steel reeds, the basis of the “gallows” phone (a basic sound powered telephone). In early 1876 Bell finally had sufficient conviction in his progress to file patent applications for the telegraphic transmission of sound. Three days after his US patent was granted Bell produced a working prototype, allowing him to convey those famous first words to his assistant in an adjoining room, “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you”. Bell and his financial backers initially tried to sell the US patent, offering it to Western Union for $100,000. When their offer was rejected, they formed The Bell Telephone Company and began promoting the new technology. Two years later the President of Western Union conceded that if he could buy the patent for $25 million, he would consider it a bargain. By 1886 there were over 150,000 telephones in use in the US. An indication of the value of Bell’s patents was the seemingly continual court challenges the company faced. In total, The Bell Telephone Company survived 587 challenges to their patents over their 18-year life, including five that progressed to the US Supreme Court (one with Western Union as the plaintiff). Bell eventually resigned from the company (partially due to the strain of the court cases) and ultimately established a summer home in Baddeck, Nova Scotia where he devoted his time to other technologies. Summary by: Richard Murphy