ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

A Life from Beginning to End

Copyright © 2017 by Hourly History.

All rights reserved.

 Table of Contents
Introduction
Childhood
Bell’s Early Teaching Endeavors
Emigration to North America
Innovations in Telegraphy
The Bell Telephone Company
The Race Against Western Union
The Photophone & The National Geographic
The Race to Save the President
A Rival to the Wright Brothers
Later Years and Death
Conclusion
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 Introduction
Alexander Graham Bell could have lived a life pursuing the career which he
appears to have been born to follow. His grandfather was a celebrated teacher
of elocution (pronunciation and articulation). His father devised a new means
of written language designed to educate the deaf. His older brother had
followed in the footsteps of both father and grandfather. Bell himself was a
gifted teacher and found a vocation in teaching English to deaf children.
Had he limited himself to this endeavor there is no doubt he would have
taught a great many deaf children to speak. But Bell was not a man to settle
into a role that he already excelled at. He liked to push his intellect and
boundaries. He began work on a multiple telegraph system as a hobby and
ended up in a frantic race to bring to market the first telephone, a race he
would win against one of the foremost inventors in history, Thomas Edison.
Bell foresaw the possibilities of using light as a medium for
communication and invented the principles by which future fiber optics
would work. His desire to save the life of a popular president would lead to
the invention of the metal detector and the iron lung, which would help
prematurely born children. A decade before the Wright brothers showed the
world that manned, powered flight was not science-fiction, Bell was on
record as stating that the development of flight would transform the world.
He then set about designing aircraft that would help pioneer the new
aeronautics industry.
Finally, he would be the founder of an institution that would educate the
world from the 1880s to the present day and beyond: The National
Geographic Society.
Alexander Graham Bell was a gifted and remarkable man with a once-in-
a-generation mind capable of being turned to any field. His discovery of the
telephone alone would transform the way societies communicate.
 Chapter One

Childhood
“I saw Sir Charles manipulate the machine and heard it speak . . . it made a
great impression upon my mind.”

—Alexander Graham Bell on the subject of Sir Charles Wheatstone’s

machine for producing artificial speech.

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847. He was the middle
child, with his brother Melville being two years older and Edward one year
younger. Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a renowned teacher of
speech and elocution.
Bell was born at 16 South Charlotte Street, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The
family then moved to 13 Hope Street when he was nine months old. His first
education was received at home courtesy of his mother. From an early age,
Bell showed a curiosity for the world around him. At the age of three or four,
while on an outing outside Edinburgh, the young Aleck (as his family called
him) decided to explore a nearby wheat field. He sat amidst the crop, which
would have been tall enough to surpass his height, and sat in silence trying to
determine if he could hear the wheat growing. Too late he realized he was
lost, though ultimately found his way back to the sound of his father’s voice.
This was one of Bell’s earliest memories and shows his intrepid and curious
spirit.
This was not the only sign of things to come. One day, Bell would be
challenged by the father of his friend Ben Herdman to find a way to remove
husks from wheat. Mr. Herdman was the owner of a flour mill at which
Aleck and Ben were constantly getting into mischief. When he issued the
challenge for the two boys to do something useful, Aleck came up with the
idea of paddling the wheat. They found an old vat and gave it rough edges on
the inside; then they put a rotating paddle wheel inside. When the wheel
turned, the wheat was forced against the rough interior of the vat, removing
the husks.
Bell was also a talented musician, displaying a good ear for music at an
early age. He received private music lessons from a famous pianist, Auguste
Benoit Bertini, leading to Bell becoming an accomplished improvisational
piano player.
In 1860, at the age of 13, Bell moved to London to be with his
grandfather, Alexander Bell. Alexander Bell was a former actor and now
earned his living teaching elocution. One year later, Aleck witnessed
something that would make an indelible impression on his young mind. He,
his grandfather, and father went to see a talk by the well-known scientist Sir
Charles Wheatstone. There they were witness to a display of a machine
which Sir Charles had invented that could reproduce human speech. Bell
wrote of the experience that though he found the results crude, it made an
impression on his mind.
Back in Edinburgh, Bell’s father challenged him and his older brother to
make their own machine for recreating human speech. The two boys became
immersed in their project, learning how different parts of the body affected
the production of speech and attempting to artificially recreate it. The end
result was a machine which could replicate with reasonable accuracy the
wails of a baby. More important than the results they achieved, Bell learned
from this exercise lessons in perseverance, research, and the functions of the
vocal cords. It would prove another pivotal moment in his life.
During Bell’s teenage years, his father was occupied with the
development of a visible language; a series of symbols that reproduced the
position and action of the tongue and lips as they made sounds. To
accomplish this, he researched extensively almost every sound the human
mouth could make. The purpose of the project was to create a written system
that could be employed by deaf people to learn speech. The Bell boys became
experts in visible speech and aided their father in his demonstrations of it.
Bell’s mother was deaf, and this gave him sympathy for the condition which
he would keep throughout his life.
Between 1860 and 1865 Bell and his brother took turns attending courses
at Edinburgh University and teaching courses at a boy’s school in Elgin,
Weston House. One would teach elocution at Weston in exchange for
instruction in more advanced courses, while the other attended the university;
then they would switch. Bell would eventually become a full-time teacher of
music and elocution at Weston.
 Chapter Two

Bell’s Early Teaching Endeavors

“. . . a talent for communicating his knowledge in such a way as to secure
and sustain the interest of his pupils. I have never seen English reading
taught with greater success.”

—Headteacher of a school where Alexander Graham Bell taught

In 1865, following the death of Bell’s grandfather, the family moved to

London. At this time Bell taught the family dog to “speak.” He achieved this
through training it to growl on demand and then manipulating different parts
of the dog’s mouth. He was eventually able to produce the sounds “How are
you grandmama” from the animal. There was more to this exercise than
simply a precocious adolescent diversion. This demonstrates the interest Bell
had in the mechanism of sound production and how that could be
manipulated.
During the same time, he and his brother were debating speech theory
with their father, as he neared completion of his visible speech system. One
of the questions which arose from these debates concerned the nature of the
vowel sounds produced by the human mouth: were these sounds
modifications of a single pitch or made from resonances in different vocal
cavities simultaneously? Bell wished to answer the question in a scientific
way and began experimenting using tuning forks to measure the pitch of
sounds produced using the tongue. He also created an instrument which used
a stretched membrane to measure the vibrations in the air caused by human
speech.
Bell’s experiments concluded that vowel sounds are compounds, made up
of different simultaneously produced tones. He compiled his results into a
report in which he noted that different vowels are produced using similar
means but with differing volumes of air in the mouth. In March 1866, Bell’s
father encouraged him to share his report with the foremost phonetics
authority of the day, Alexander John Ellis, who was so impressed that he
nominated Bell for membership of the London Philological Society.
Ellis also encouraged Bell to continue his studies and gave him a book by
a German researcher named Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz had used
tuning forks to determine the tones of vowels just as Bell had done. In the
book, Helmholtz describes how electromagnetic streams are produced by the
vibrations of a tuning fork which can be communicated to other forks and
produce vowel sounds artificially. Bell read this and took it to mean that
Helmholtz was working on producing human vowel sounds through electrical
means. It gave him the idea of transmitting speech through a telegraph wire.
One of Bell’s life’s works was now set; the other would emerge as he
embarked on his career as a teacher.
In 1867 Bell accepted a teaching position in Bath. He, like all of the Bell
children, had struggled with ill health due to the polluted atmosphere of their
home cities of Edinburgh and London. The move to the west of England
seemed to help with Bell’s symptoms, but his younger brother was not so
fortunate. Edward died of tuberculosis later in the year.
Bell taught in Bath for a year before returning to London in 1868. He had
established himself at Bath as having a natural gift for the teaching of
English, and Bell’s former headteacher regretted his departure. In a London
school run by a Susanne Hull (one of his father’s former elocution pupils),
Bell taught a class of deaf children using the visible speech system. This was
his first introduction to what would be the other half of his life’s work:
teaching speech to the deaf.
 Chapter Three

Emigration to North America

“A man’s judgement should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.”

—Alexander Graham Bell

In 1869 Melville Bell was visiting the United States to promote the visible
speech system. He had found little money in the development in the UK but
had received sufficiently strong response in the United States that he was
now giving serious consideration to emigrating. At this time, Bell was
continuing to teach at the Hull school. This career seemed to be a promising
avenue as the British government prepared to invest more money in the
speech education of the deaf.
But in 1870, Bell’s older brother Melville also succumbed to tuberculosis.
Until then, Bell had been resistant to the idea of emigration due to the
progress he was making in teaching the deaf in United Kingdom. The death
of his last brother, however, appears to have decided Bell in favor of a new
start overseas. The Bells landed in Canada on August 1, 1870. Bell’s parents
had purchased a property in Brantford, Ontario.
Bell’s time was taken up with teaching jobs arranged by his father across
Boston and New England. On April 6, 1871, he secured a term’s employment
at the Boston School for the Deaf. He impressed the school’s principal, Sarah
Fuller, so much that he was offered further employment in the fall term.
On October 1, 1872, he took on a private student, five-year-old George
Sanders, the son of a Massachusetts leather merchant. George had been born
deaf and had never spoken a word or attended school. Bell was living at a
rooming house at 35 West Newton Street, and his new pupil moved next door
with his nurse. He made immediate progress with young George, but despite
his success, Bell’s enthusiasm for inventing was growing.
Boston was a hotbed of emerging technology, and in the late nineteenth
century one invention that was the subject of great speculation was the
telegraph. The Great Eastern steamship laid the first successful transatlantic
telegraph cable in 1865. One of America’s first national corporations,
Western Union, had a virtual monopoly of coast-to-coast telegraph services.
Telegraph communication was in demand and used by businesses and rich
individuals. The technology was still in its infancy though. Western Union
messages took days to travel across the continent and required rekeying at
least once as the signal strength waned. This meant high costs per message.
There was a huge appetite for further developments of the telegraph system,
and this inspired Bell.
In November 1872 Bell began to work on a system that would allow for
more than one message to be transmitted on the same wire. It didn’t take him
long to replicate a device which had been patented by Joseph B. Stearns and
purchased by Western Union—the duplex telegraph for transmitting multiple
signals on one wire. This demonstrates Bell’s inherent understanding of the
mechanics of telegraphy. His understanding stemmed not just from work in
the field but also from his expertise in elocution and speech therapy. He had
learned from his grandfather and father the mechanisms by which the human
body produces sounds and had already experimented with artificial means of
reproducing these sounds. Bell was coming into the telegraphy market from
an angle that would enable him to leap ahead of other inventors who had
been working in the field for far longer.
Throughout 1872, Bell worked on two things. By day he taught George
Sanders, and by night he worked on his telegraphy experiments. Both
missions proved successful. With his young charge, he began by assigning
labels to the child’s favorite toys. Each label was reproduced in a card file.
George was used to requesting a toy by making gestures. When a toy was
presented to George, his attention was drawn to the label. He then matched
the label to the corresponding card. Subsequently, George would ask for the
toy by picking out the card from the file. Bell then made use of a glove
inscribed with the alphabet to break down the word on the card into its
constituent parts. Using the glove, he was able to carry out conversations
with George in public.
He continued tutoring George, and within three years the child was able
to write letters home to his parents. This demonstrated a mastery of writing
and vocabulary; his letters describing traveling home to Salem also showed
an awareness of abstract concepts such as time. This is an incredible
achievement considering George’s complete lack of previous education and
his deafness from birth.
Bell’s skills and inventiveness as a teacher are demonstrated by the rapid
progress that George Sanders was able to make. Such was the success that he
was invited to give lectures on his father’s visible speech system and the
education of the deaf around Boston and at the prestigious Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
 Chapter Four

Innovations in Telegraphy
“I came to believe firmly in the feasibility of the telegraphic transmission of
speech, and I used to tell my friends that someday we should talk by
telegraph.”

—Alexander Graham Bell

Bell’s experiments in telegraphy were intended to achieve the transmission of

the human voice across a wire. In this work, he was building on experimental
work undertaken by others before him. The concept of transmitting words
through ringing different bells, using an electrically charged wire had been
suggested anonymously in a letter to The Scots Magazine in 1753. In 1814,
Ralph Wedgwood proposed a working telegraph system in England, but it
was not taken up commercially. Subsequently there were many more
technological developments in the telegraphy field, with Samuel Morse being
one of the principal pioneers.
French inventor Charles Bourseul developed a theory of transmitting
human speech electronically using a diaphragm to capture the vibrations of
speech and a system of electrical contacts whose connection to a battery was
triggered by the vibrations of the diaphragm. It remained a theory not put into
practice but inspired a German inventor, Philipp Reis. In 1861, Reis
developed a means of transmitting electronic tones across long distances
through a wire. His invention was not capable of transmitting speech, but he
named it the telephone.
So, Bell was not operating in a vacuum. He was building on the learning
of men who had gone before and was experimenting alongside others who
were engaged in similar quests. In May 1874 Elisha Gray developed a
machine that could transmit eight musical tones electrically to a receiver. He
was backed by Western Union. Thomas Edison was also occupied with the
same work.
 Bell’s work, meanwhile, was halted when he attempted to file for pending
patents for his harmonic telegraph. He was informed that he could not file for
a pending patent in the United States as he was a foreigner; foreigners could
only apply for completed patents. Similarly, he couldn’t apply for a patent in
the United Kingdom due to his absence during the application process.
This discouraged Bell enough to discard his research into the telegraph as
a device for sending multiple signals at once. He decided to focus on
applications related to his teaching work instead, namely the reproduction of
sound waves, and ultimately, the human voice. Again, he was inspired by the
work of others. A Frenchman, Leon Scott, had developed a phonautograph
device which drew the shape of sounds, and Rudolph Koenig had developed
a manometric flame, a gas flame that could be controlled by the human voice.
Bell’s parents had disapproved of his obsession with telegraph
technology, preferring him to focus on his work as an educator. His letters
show how his mind was moving in that direction, describing these inventions
to his parents and how they could be adapted to educate the deaf by allowing
them to see the sounds they were making.
In the summer of 1874 back home in Brantford, Bell assembled a device
that used the ear of a dead man to draw sound waves (utilizing the delicate
bones of the inner ear). During these experiments, Bell realized that an
undulating electrical current could be made to replicate the changing
frequencies that make up human speech. This would be a pivotal concept
behind the telephone. He received financial backing from George Sanders'
father and sought out further backing from the father of another pupil,
Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Hubbard would be an important patron, a man
who understood the technology and shared Bell’s vision. He was a patent
attorney so he also understood the highly competitive nature of the race to
develop the technology which Bell was theorizing.
A three-way partnership was agreed on between Bell, Sanders, and
Hubbard to bring to market a telegraph system for the sending of multiple
signals simultaneously. Thomas Edison had already done this in March 1874,
but his system could only transmit four signals. Bell was confident his
harmonic telegraph could at least double that output. At the beginning of
1875 Bell acquired an assistant in Thomas A. Watson, a machinist. Watson
and Bell worked out of Salem, Massachusetts, and in February 1875 they
developed a machine that could transmit and reproduce writing. The machine
was the telautograph, and it was the first patent which Bell would achieve.
The patent was granted on April 6, 1875.
Hubbard explained to Bell that he was now engaged in a race. Their main
competitor was the Western Union-backed Elisha Gray. Though Bell’s mind
continued to move back to the means of transmitting the voice by wire,
Hubbard’s thoughts were focused exclusively on the invention that would
make the biggest financial impact: the multiple signal telegraph. Hubbard
would continue to steer his protege in this direction. It was at Hubbard’s
urging, and from his experience as a patent attorney, that Bell began keeping
all documentation related to his inventions including letters describing his
theories to his parents. These documents and notes would be crucial in a
patent dispute.
On June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson succeeded in developing a machine
that transmitted a tone to a metal reed in the receiver. When the
corresponding reed at the other end was twanged, Bell heard a tone at his
end. This was achieved without any external electrical power source such as a
battery. What Bell and Watson had created was a telegraphic transmitter
where the vibrations of sound itself were able to induce an electrical current;
they proved the basic principle of inducing current through sound vibrations
which would be reproduced at the other end.
On June 30, 1875, Watson built an apparatus designed by Bell for the
transmission of speech. This was the first ever Alexander Graham Bell
telephone. It worked as a result of air pressure from speech acting against a
membrane which in turn caused a steel armature to vibrate which induced
movement in a magnet and a continuous, undulating electrical current which
flowed to a receiver. At the other end, the current caused a vibration in a reed
in the receiver which reproduced the voice. The first test took place on July 1,
1875, and while Bell shouted, spoke, and sang into one end, Watson heard his
muffled voice at the other, transmitted along the wire.
The year of 1875 was pivotal in Bell’s life, as the first prototype
telephone was brought into existence. Bell was only 28 at this point and was
already pioneering a new technology despite no formal knowledge of or
training in electrical engineering. But there was another aspect of his life that
he had neglected—the finding of a wife. Before emigrating to North
America, he had proposed and been rejected by one woman, and had then
begun courting another. Now he found himself in love again, this time with
Mabel Hubbard. Mabel was one of his pupils, deaf since an attack of scarlet
fever in her childhood. She was also the 18-year-old daughter of Bell’s
business partner, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Mabel agreed to the proposal on
November 25, 1875.
Bell’s parents had been against the match, citing his lack of financial
means with which to keep a wife. Bell was also under pressure from Hubbard
to choose his inventing work over his teaching of the deaf. It may have been
the need to provide for Mabel that tipped Bell towards making a financial
success of his invention.
From 1876 onwards he would become completely fixated on the
development of the telephone. Bell arranged for a Canadian businessman,
Thomas Brown, to take a copy of his patent application to England to be filed
before Bell filed his American patent. If filed in England first, Bell alone
would have the rights to the invention outside of America. This appears to be
some astute thinking from Bell with regards to securing the future of his
matrimony and family from any souring of his business partnership. But, on
reaching England, Brown didn’t file the patent.
This was fortuitous, however, as Bell added to his American patent a note
on the use of variable resistance transmission which would not have been in
the English one. This was an important clause as his eventual invention
would make use of it. Hubbard had his lawyers file the patent while Bell
waited for word of the English patent, which would never come. The patent
from Bell was filed on February 14, 1876—the same day as one from Elisha
Gray for a caveat patent, i.e. a patent for a device not yet completed. This was
the same sort of patent which Bell had been denied as he was a foreigner in
the United States.
It was now that Bell’s notes, letters, and other papers proved to be the
difference. He had kept any document which contained descriptions of or
conversations about his telephone. He had even asked his parents to carefully
file any letter in which he made mention of it. He had taken up the habit of
dating each document in the event he had to prove when certain ideas had
been discovered. So when Elisha Gray’s patent request made mention of an
undulating current, Bell was able to show an 1875 document that mentioned
the same principle. The patent examiner highlighted another area of similarity
between Gray and Bell. Gray had made mention of a variable-resistance
transmitter. Bell had documented this a year earlier but hadn’t actively
pursued it in his work. He had added it, almost as an afterthought, to the
parent application from those earlier notes. It would seem that when the
patent examiner, Zenas F. Wilber, pointed this out it struck a chord in Bell.
When he returned to his experiments, it was with this concept very much in
mind.
There was nothing underhand or unethical about this. Bell wasn’t shown
the actual caveat which Gray had applied for. But as his patent had,
fortunately, been submitted earlier in the day than Gray’s he had the right to
review areas of similarity. Of course, if Bell had waited for news of his
English patent being granted then Gray’s would have taken precedence. Bell
undoubtedly had the documentary evidence to prove the origins of all aspects
of his invention. And as he was applying for a full patent, not a caveat, he
would have been given precedence. But Hubbard’s impatience, resulting in
the patent submission behind Bell’s back, may well have made the difference
in Alexander Graham Bell being credited with the invention which would
make his fortune and change the world forever.
The patent was granted on March 7, 1876. On March 10, Watson and Bell
had constructed an apparatus at 5 Exeter Place, Salem. It used a liquid
variable-resistance transmitter, and through it, Watson became the first man
in the world to hear a voice through a telephone. Bell said, “Mr. Watson,
come here, I want to see you.” Bell then heard Watson say “Mr. Bell, do you
understand what I say?” In a letter written to his father the same day, Bell
described his vision of homes connected to each other by telegraph wires
enabling people to communicate with each other without leaving home. From
his teenage years, he had been thinking about the idea of reproducing human
speech via artificial means. He had believed it possible to transmit the sounds
of speech via electrical means and having brought his invention to life, he
could see how it had the potential to change the world.
 Chapter Five

The Bell Telephone Company

“Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you.”

—Alexander Graham Bell, first words transmitted via telephone.

Bell worked on two versions of the telephone: the liquid variable resistance
and the magneto telephone. By May 1876 he was beginning to show his new
inventions. He started with a group of Harvard professors and then performed
a public display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on May 25.
Bell’s backers wished him to display on a much larger scale to show the
world his inventions—not just the telephone but his multiple telegraph as
well. For this purpose, the greatest stage in the world was available to Bell in
the shape of the International Centennial Exhibition.
President Ulysses S. Grant and the emperor of Brazil attended the
opening ceremony on May 10, 1876, and saw the exhibits covering art and
technology from 37 countries. Bell was persuaded to travel to Philadelphia
for his inventions to be included in the judging for the prize of best electrical
invention. Also there was his rival for the development of the multiple
telegraph, Elisha Gray. Bell appears not to have been the best at marketing
his inventions, however, and took some persuading to make the trip. It seems
likely he was overawed by the occasion. Having arrived and set up his exhibit
on June 25, Bell was helped in gaining the attention of the judges by Dom
Pedro, the emperor of Brazil, who had visited the Boston School for the Deaf
and had taken an interest in Melville Bell’s books on visible speech.
He and the other judges had been receiving a demonstration of Elisha
Gray’s multiple harmonic telegraph, backed by an impressive display
provided by the Western Union. Dom Pedro then saw Bell at the other end of
the huge hall in which the electrical inventions were being judged. His
breaking off to talk to Bell attracted attention, and soon the judges were
gathered at Bell’s exhibit. He explained the multiple telegraph, and Sir
William Thomson (head of the judging panel) and Dom Pedro were both able
to use it to send simultaneous signals. Then Sir William was given a
demonstration of the telephone. Hearing Bell’s voice on the other end, he
became very excited. Dom Pedro and Elisha Gray also received a
demonstration; they were able to hear some or all of Bell’s words from
another room through the telephone wire.
Bell continued to test the limits of his new invention. When visiting his
parents in Brantford, Ontario, he ran wire around the house, then from the
house to the Brantford telegraph office. He then went further, running a line
from the Bell house to the town of Paris, eight miles away. For this
experiment, he used a three-way receiver and was able to verify that multiple
voices could be carried on the line at the same time. In October 1876, Bell
and Watson had their first two-way conversation between rooms at 5 Exeter
Place, followed by a conversation two miles apart on October 9. By
December they had established the limit of the technology currently, with
Bell’s voice hardly intelligible over the 143 miles from Boston to North
Conway, New Hampshire.
By the end of 1876 William Orton, head of Western Union, was
expressing an interest in the technology. He was offered the rights to the
invention for $100,000 by Hubbard but refused it. Instead Orton contacted
Thomas Edison and instructed him to begin work on his own version. Edison
had success in producing a version which produced a clearer, louder voice
than Bell’s. Orton founded the American Speaking Telephone Company with
Edison and Elisha Gray.
Bell was almost broke, spending increasing amounts of time lecturing on
the subject of the telephone to promote it, while his business partners tried to
create a company from scratch in a technological field that was brand new. In
competition they now faced two talented electrical inventors backed by the
wealthiest corporation in America.
The Bell telephone reached the market in 1877. Hubbard had decided to
lease the telephone to homes and businesses, maintaining control of both
device and system. The idea of line rental from a telecoms company is one
that is familiar to us. It proved a farsighted decision by Hubbard, though one
that meant profits built much more slowly. On July 4, 1877, a year after the
demonstration at the International Centennial Exhibition, some 200
telephones were in use. Within a month this had increased to 778 and by the
end of August to 1100. Hubbard expanded the business by allowing other
companies to use the technology under license. On August 27, 1877, this
enabled the New York Telephone Company to construct the first phone line
in New York City.
In Canada, the telephone patent was put into the name of Bell’s father. He
would connect three homes in Brantford and then the Canadian prime
minister’s house to the home of the governor-general, renting them a
telephone each. By the end of August, after significantly less than a year on
the market, the telephone was in use in New York, Canada, Philadelphia,
Chicago, and San Francisco. It was the invention of the age and even in its
technological infancy was transforming the way people did business and
communicated with each other.
 Chapter Six

The Race Against Western Union

“Telephones for the transmission of articulate speech through instruments
not more than twenty miles apart. Conversation can easily be carried on after
slight practice and with occasional repetition of a word or sentence.”

—Flyer issued as part of marketing of the Bell Telephone in 1877

On July 11, 1877, Bell married Mabel Hubbard. He was 30 and she 19. They
traveled to England for a honeymoon where Bell found that his fame had
preceded him. The couple was wined and dined by the elite of English
society including Queen Victoria. By this time, Mabel was pregnant and was
advised against making an Atlantic crossing. Their daughter, Elsie May Bell,
was born on May 10, 1878 while in England.
Back in the United States, the Western Union Company were winning the
fight to dominate the telephone market. They had the advantage of their
existing wire networks to connect their telephones, meaning they could be up
and running in new towns and cities much faster than the Bell operation.
They also had the advantage of Thomas Edison’s developments on the
receiver. Edison’s telephone was providing a much higher quality of voice
than Bell’s. Towards the end of 1877, while Bell was still in England, stock
speculators were downplaying the value of Bell, and their stock remained
low. Meanwhile, Western Union was buying Bell stock, trying to obtain
control of the company and eliminate their rival.
Hubbard decided to fight back by launching a patent infringement
lawsuit, using a Western Union agent, Peter A. Dowd, as his fall guy. A new
general manager was hired for the Bell Telephone Company, Theodore N.
Vail. Fresh investment was also brought in along with a new president,
Colonel William H. Forbes. Forbes and Vail would lead the market battle
against Western Union. Watson had improved the product they were selling
after discovering two inventors, Emile Berliner and Francis Blake, who had
improved on Edison’s design. Watson bought the rights to their design and
brought them both into the Bell Telephone Company. The quality gap at least
was closed.
The copyright infringement trial took place amid a storm of publicity
from Western Union claiming that Bell had stolen his invention from Elisha
Gray. The first depositions were taken on March 5, 1877. Bell shares were
worth $50 at the time. As the trial wore on it became clear that Western
Union had little hope of proving that their man was the real inventor of the
telephone. When Bell himself took the stand he was helped by his
considerable presence and ability of oratory. His near photographic memory
was also a huge help. Bell explained his thought processes in developing the
telephone and talked through the extensive notes and paperwork that
accompanied his patent.
By September 9, 1877, the Bell shares had increased from $50 a share to
$300. In October they had reached $500 and by December $700. Bell and his
wife made themselves a fortune selling their shares in the Bell Telephone
Company. Despite the success of the company, Bell was not in the best
financial position.
The trial came to an end on November 10, 1879, when Western Union
settled out of court. The deal included that all telephone lines, switchboard,
and telephony patents were to be handed over to the Bell Telephone
Company on the proviso that Bell did not expand their operations into the
telegraph industry. As telephones would render the telegraph largely
redundant, this seemed hardly to matter. Bell Telephone had been in
existence for just three years and now possessed a nationwide monopoly on
the telephony market.
 Chapter Seven

The Photophone & The National

Geographic
“I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the
passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk. I have heard articulate speech
produced by sunlight!”

—Alexander Graham Bell in a letter to his father on the subject of the

photophone.

By the 1880s the Bells were living comfortably thanks to their selling of Bell
Telephone shares at the right time. They relocated to Washington D.C. in
1879. Bell now had little to do with the telephone company other than
appearing as a witness in a series of patent trials which were brought against
them. At 32, Bell had reached a point in his life which most men never
achieve. He had perfected a breakthrough invention that was revolutionizing
society. He had founded a great company which was growing into a corporate
colossus and had made his fortune. To achieve so much at such a young age
is a remarkable achievement, made even more remarkable when considering
that for the most of the time he was working part-time as an inventor and full
time as a teacher.
Now Bell’s mind turned to a further enhancement of his invention. He
had proved it was possible to transmit a voice electronically over a wire.
Could it be done wirelessly—perhaps using light as its medium? His
inspiration was the work of an Atlantic telegraph engineer named
Willoughby Smith who had used the element selenium for the cable due to its
high resistance. He reported that the resistance seemed to vary depending on
whether it was day or night. To Bell this seemed to suggest that it would be
possible to hear the moment when sunlight fell across the wire. To this end he
began to experiment, aided by Charles Sumner Tainter, a maker of optical
instruments. They constructed an apparatus that used mirrors to reflect
sunlight into the machine and a lens to focus it. A rubber mouthpiece directed
the sound of the voice onto a transmitter.
Their idea was that sound waves striking a mirror on one side would
affect the light waves being reflected from the other side. A dish collected the
reflected light and directed into onto a cell of selenium which was connected
to a circuit with a telephone. They began experimenting with different
wavelengths of light and with polarized light as well as sunlight to see which
had the biggest effect. Bell stockpiled selenium, a rare element, until he
believed he had the world’s largest single supply. The selenium used was
prepared as a delicate crystal with very low resistance, making it sensitive to
the smallest degree of light.
On February 22, 1880, he tested the machine, which he named the
photophone, with his cousin, Charles. Charles Bell operated the transmitting
photophone in one room while Bell listened in the basement. In his notes,
Bell described hearing the words “hoy, hoy, hoy” with the vowels
particularly distinct. He also made out the words to “God Save the Queen”
and sentences “Do you hear me? Do you understand me?” It appeared that
Bell’s photophone worked to transmit the human voice wirelessly using light;
they even managed to stretch the distance from transmitter to receiver to over
200 meters.
Not long after this discovery, Bell became a father for the second time as
Mabel gave birth to another girl, Marian. Bell’s wholehearted dedication to
his discoveries and his work as an inventor can be seen in his wife’s words.
She wrote of his regarding his new photophone as his second baby while their
second daughter was his third. She also wrote of the time which Bell spent on
his invention, feeling that his new daughter was being largely ignored in
favor of time spent on his work. This gives an insight not just into Bell’s
dedication and work ethic but also the single-minded enthusiasm which his
work produced in him.
After reading the book written by Hermann von Helmholtz, Bell had
come to believe it was possible to reproduce the human voice electronically.
He had not relented for a moment until he had achieved this, despite the
urgings to put this work aside by his business partners who wanted him to
concentrate on the more immediately commercial multiple telegraph. After
hearing of the observations of Willoughby Smith, Bell had decided to find a
way to transmit sound by light, and even fatherhood could not keep him from
achieving his goal. He had gone from being a demonstrator of his father’s
innovative system of teaching English to the deaf, to becoming an innovative
teacher of the deaf in his own right, and then to being a full-time inventor—
all by the age of 30.
He had developed and brought his telephone to market at a time when
telegraph technology was well established. Though an innovative leap to go
from transmission of signals to transmission of voices, it was within the
technological capability of the age (as demonstrated by the fact that Thomas
Edison and others were able to improve on Bell’s designs so quickly). The
photophone was a proof of concept: light could be used as a medium for
transmitting complex sounds. It was a long way beyond the technology of the
nineteenth century to realize fully; his invention was only effective over a
small range and required line of sight and a sunny day. But by the end of the
twentieth century, his photophone would finally be developed as fiber optics.
Bell couldn’t have predicted the technology of fiber optics or the
concomitant technologies which would go with this development, but he had
predicted the principle by which this advanced technology would operate. His
vision first brought it into being. He presaged another technological
development, though he didn’t realize it. A French scientist named Ernest
Mercadier highlighted that Bell’s photophone made use of radiant energy, as
it used invisible infrared energy. He pointed out that a more correct name for
the invention would be radiophone. Bell had devised a means of transmitting
speech by means of radiant energy, a path that would also be walked 20 years
later by Marconi to develop the first wireless radio.
At the same time as he was working on his photophone Bell was also
embarked on another enterprise in the world of publishing. Bell was a
believer in what he called auto education—the principle of educating oneself.
He was a subscriber to a number of scientific magazines and journals and saw
the value in them as educational tools. Bell took over publication of Science
magazine from Thomas Edison in 1881, though it would prove a financial
burden which he subsequently handed on to others.
In January 1888, Bell founded the National Geographic Society. This
would be a non-profit organization existing to promote knowledge and
learning to its members. It would achieve this through the publication of a
journal which initially comprised the text of lectures given by its members,
thus sharing those lectures with a much wider audience. By the early
twentieth century, the National Geographic Society had a membership of
over 10,000 people, and its magazine would establish itself as one of the
country’s greatest ever. By the late twentieth century it had even expanded
into TV, a medium Bell would doubtless have found fascinating, with the
National Geographic channel.
 Chapter Eight

The Race to Save the President

“Poor Garfield has gone. How terrible it all is.”

—Alexander Graham Bell in a letter to his wife on the subject of the passing
of President James Garfield.

In 1881, circumstances arose that would prompt Bell to another invention

which has become commonplace today and has given rise to a range of other
technologies and developments.
On July 2, 1881, while walking through Washington D.C.’s railroad
station, President James Garfield was shot in the back by Charles Guiteau.
The president was taken to the White House with the bullet lodged near his
spine. For days, doctors tried to locate and remove the bullet by hand but
could not. They feared that continued invasion of the wound would cause a
problem because of the delicate soft tissue in which the bullet was lodged.
Finally, Simon Newcombe telegraphed Bell to see if he could help.
Newcombe asked if Bell, with his knowledge of induction coils, could invent
a device that could locate the slug. Newcombe knew that an electric current
that passed through a coil of wire creates a magnetic field around it, as did
Bell who had used magnetism in his design for the telephone. Bell went to
work immediately.
Bell was familiar with the work of a New York inventor who had
discovered that when two magnetic fields were balanced against each other,
the interposing of a metal object between unbalanced them. Bell reasoned
that if a telephone was connected to one of the currents he would hear a
sound when this unbalancing occurred, i.e. when the metal object was near.
By July 17, Bell had devised a device that could detect a bullet held in a
clenched hand to a depth of two inches. To increase the strength of the
detector, Bell set about trying different lengths of wire and diameter of coil.
His work was of great interest to the general public; telegrams from Bell to
his wife were even being leaked to the press by Western Union telegraph
workers. Bell eventually sent telegrams on his progress to his wife, knowing
full well that they would be intercepted and shared with the press.
On July 26 Bell took his device to the White House, ordering the
president to be put on a bed without metal springs. But his device didn’t
work. He and Charles Sumner Tainter later discovered a component which
had been wired into the overall construction incorrectly. A week later, they
had corrected the error and had improved the machine to detect an object to a
depth of six centimeters. They tested the device on a Civil War veteran with a
bullet lodged in his body. The machine worked perfectly.
On August 1, they tried again with Garfield but still couldn’t locate the
bullet. However, back at the laboratory, the detector worked perfectly. Bell
even shot a bullet into a carcass from a butcher’s shop, and his machine
located it. Bell was confident that the machine worked. It was discovered that
contrary to Bell’s instructions, the president was lying on a steel wire
mattress. By now it was too late. The president was deemed too frail to be
moved again. Bell was not treated favorably in the press. Mabel remarked in
letters her dismay that her husband, during his experiments, was being
derided and treated as a charlatan. The announcement that his invention had
failed didn’t help this perception of Bell among the press. Garfield would
eventually succumb to his wounds and died on September 19, 1881.
Bell took his invention no further, as he had done with the photophone.
But from his groundwork would come the metal detector. Another man, Dr.
John H. Girdner, would eventually bring the metal detector to market as a
medical appliance which he called the telephone probe. It would find
extensive use during the Boer War, the Sino-Japanese War, and the First
World War before the development of the x-ray. Bell was aware of this use of
his invention; he wrote of his satisfaction that it was being used to relieve
suffering and save lives.
Bell’s next invention would be inspired by a personal tragedy. Not long
after the death of President Garfield, the Bells’ third child was born.
Tragically, their son Edward was born prematurely and died just hours
afterward. Mabel wrote that their child might have survived had the doctors
been able to help him establish regular breathing. Bell’s way of dealing with
his grief appears to have been to throw himself into his work. He set about
trying to develop a device to assist with breathing.
To Bell this must have been a very personal crusade. He had lost both of
his brothers to tuberculosis, and now his newborn son had died as a result of
the weakness of his lungs after a premature birth. Bell called his invention the
vacuum jacket. In his notes, he described how the vacuum jacket squeezed
the lungs to expel air and featured a rigid apparatus to cover the middle of the
body. The diaphragm would be manipulated via a pump action to create a
vacuum in the lungs into which external air would rush. Thus the full action
of breathing would be created artificially.
The device was presented at scientific conferences in both America and
Britain but wouldn’t find widespread use immediately. Many years later Bell
would adapt his vacuum jacket to create a device to help victims of
drowning. It was tested on an unconscious sheep which had been thrown into
the sea. Bell’s modified vacuum jacket was able to evacuate the water from
the animal’s lungs and restart its respiration. He had invented a machine to
perform what we would recognize as CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation).
At the time, however, the farm workers who witnessed the sheep being
brought back to life claimed that Bell was the devil.
In the autumn of 1882, the Bells had moved to Rhode Island, and Bell
was looking for a new project to occupy his mind. The answer was the
phonograph. This was an invention which had been developed by Thomas
Edison and subsequently discarded as impractical. Bell decided he could
improve upon the invention. Edison had been engaged in the development of
a machine for transcribing Morse code onto paper as indentations. He
realized that a cylinder containing the indentations spinning at sufficient
speed produced a sound. By attaching a diaphragm connected to a stylus, the
vibrations of the sounds caused vibrations in the diaphragm which in turn
moved the stylus to inscribe the Morse code as indentations.
Edison’s eventual invention utilized a tin foil cylinder which was
inscribed upon by a stylus moving up and down. When the cylinder was
spun, the sounds were reproduced. The problem was that the replaying of the
indentations distorted them, allowing them to be replayed only once. The
sounds were also of poor quality because the stylus was reading indentations
in the material instead of deeper grooves. Bell began experiments to improve
Edison’s machine alongside his cousin, Chichester, and his long-standing
assistant Charles Sumner Tainter.
Bell’s version of the phonograph used a wax cylinder with a needle that
zig-zagged sideways in grooved tracks. This seemed to produce a much more
faithful recording of the sound. Bell’s version recorded by actually cutting
into the cylinder instead of merely making an indentation. The design proved
such an improvement on the model which Edison had discarded, that he
purchased the patent for the Bell machine in order to market the machine
commercially. Tainter and Chichester Bell adapted the device using sewing
machine parts and founded the Dictaphone Company. This company would
become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of dictaphones and related
telephonic recording systems. Their success was born from Bell’s vision of a
practical, working dictation recording system.
These inventions are a testament to Bell’s inventive mind and scientific
genius. Bell had no formal scientific background, but he had an enquiring
mind and was clearly very intelligent. He had made himself an expert in
telegraphic technology, and the invention of the telephone was an offshoot of
this. In developing the first iron lung so rapidly after his son’s death
demonstrates a mind capable to turning itself to other areas of invention, a
long way from the field he had become expert in over the last decade. Bell
was, by this point, an inventor first and foremost.
It should be remembered that Bell lived in an age of invention. But not
every invention was destined to survive for long. That Bell’s principal
inventions proved long-standing successes into the next century demonstrates
his vision.
 Chapter Nine

A Rival to the Wright Brothers

“What a man my husband is . . . I am perfectly bewildered at the number and
size of the ideas in which his head is crammed . . . Flying machines to which
telephones and torpedoes are to be attached.”

—Mabel Bell

By the summer of 1885, Bell had faced further patent trials aimed at wresting
control of the telephone out of the hands of the Bell Telephone Company
before the allotted 17-year-protection time was up. In one particular trial, Bell
faced a personal attack by the accusation that he had bribed the patent
examiner, Zenas Wilber, to get a look at Elisha Gray’s patent caveat and
subsequently steal the design for the telephone. Bell was able to defend
himself against the accusation, but it left him feeling depressed and seeking
escape from his fame.
Melville Bell suggested Newfoundland where he had spent time as a
young man; he also wished to join Bell and his family on the trip. They
journeyed to Nova Scotia and then on to Newfoundland. The journey would
result in the Bells relocating from Boston permanently. After visiting
Newfoundland, they made their way back to Nova Scotia and the town of
Baddeck. It was there that Bell met and befriended a man named Arthur
McCurdy. Bell repaired McCurdy’s phone, and McCurdy subsequently
became Bell’s agent and assistant. When Bell discovered a picturesque
peninsula on the Bras d’Or lakes, McCurdy arranged for the purchase of the
land. The Bells would call the spot, Beinn Bhreagh, or “Beautiful Mountain”
in Gaelic. The house itself would be called the Lodge and was designed by
Bell and McCurdy. The Lodge would provide a welcome getaway for the
Bells from the stresses of the celebrity life.
In 1893, a journalist interviewing Bell asked for his views on inventions
which he saw as having the greatest impact on the world yet to come. Bell
told the reporter that it was in the arena of powered flight that the greatest
revolution would unfold and that it would completely change both
transportation and war. The first successful powered flight (by the Wright
brothers) would not be made for almost ten years, and yet Bell predicted the
flight revolution. His prescience was eerily accurate, especially considering
that few scientists regarded powered flight as being anything but a far-fetched
fantasy.
Serious experiments in flight had been undertaken by Samuel Langley of
the Smithsonian Institute since 1886. He made experiments on aerodynamics
and had experimented with different models, powered by twisted bands of
rubber and with various wing configurations. Bell discovered these
experiments when Langley announced his work in the Smithsonian
Contributions to Knowledge. Bell began his own work from his new Nova
Scotia hideaway by experimenting with propellers, while Langley focused on
wings.
Bell focused his attention on helicopter models. In 1891 he established
that a two-bladed propeller appeared most effective at generating lift. Bell’s
helicopter design incorporated cloth propellers powered with steam jets at
their tips. On January 6, 1892, he had a small eight-and-a-half-inch boiler
designed, weighing less than a pound. The blades would be attached to this,
and the steam generated by the boiler would turn the propellers via the jets at
the end, in turn lifting the entire assembly. He used a combination of alcohol
and water in the boiler but couldn’t get the boiler pressure high enough. One
experiment was made using pure alcohol but resulted in an explosion.
Undeterred, Bell tried brass propellers instead. A design with three
paddle-like propellers reached a height of over a hundred feet on June 10. He
made notes and diagrams of how the finished machine might look. His design
incorporated a large propeller as the primary means of elevation with a
smaller rotor and wings to control direction and prevent the machine from
whirling around in circles. His prototype design was very similar to a modern
helicopter.
Bell was becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of powered
flight. The more he experimented, the more he became convinced that it was
possible. He requested every book on aviation available from a Boston
bookstore and entered into correspondence with Octave Chanute, an
American aviation pioneer who would go on to mentor the Wright brothers.
In 1893, the Lodge was finally completed. Samuel Langley was one of
the first guests. He was another aspiring aviation pioneer, although his
interest was in achieving horizontal flight rather than the vertical flight of a
helicopter. Arthur McCurdy would later help Langley buy himself a plot of
land not far from the Bells’ home.
By 1895 Bell was experimenting with the angle of his propeller blades
and studying the arrangement of wings. Mabel wrote that she felt her husband
was ahead of Langley and others in the aviation field and that he was gaining
an understanding of the mechanics of flight. However, on May 9, 1895, it
was Langley who achieved the first ever powered flight by a heavier-than-air
machine. Bell was excited to witness the event in Washington.
Bell didn’t see Langley as a competitor as he had Elisha Gray and
Thomas Edison. Instead, he funded Langley’s work and encouraged him.
Langley had been ridiculed by the established scientific community and the
press in the pursuit of his goals, but Bell supported him. On May 12, 1896,
Bell was one of a few witnesses of a further development of Langley’s work.
It was called the aerodrome. This machine achieved a height of a hundred
feet and a distance of half a mile before its steam ran out, and the construct
glided to the ground again without a crash. Bell was convinced that he had
witnessed the practicality of powered flight.
In 1898 the outbreak of the Spanish-American War further fueled Bell’s
enthusiasm for flight. He reasoned that flying machines would be
inordinately useful in the gathering of intelligence. So convinced was he of
the usefulness and life-saving potential of powered flight that he refused to
travel with this family to Europe; he stayed to continue his research.
In September 1901 Bell invited the astronomer and flight skeptic Simon
Newcomb to the Lodge. Langley was also present. The group ended up
debating how a cat manages to fall on its feet. Newcomb refused to accept
that this was possible, and so an experiment was set up whereby cats were
dropped from the house’s veranda to a pile of mattresses and cushions
beneath. Each time the cat turned in the air and landed on its feet. No-one
could explain how the animal achieved this.
Another principle expounded by Newcomb was that powered flight was
impossible because the larger a flying machine is, its weight is cubed while
its lifting surfaces are only squared. This meant that an aircraft large enough
to carry a person could not possibly fly. Bell disagreed and formulated his
rebuttal in terms of kites. He reasoned that a kite loaded with a man flies well
in a breeze; it should continue to fly well if provided with an engine. Kites
became Bell’s newest obsession, and he experimented with a wide variety,
focusing on the most complex constructions that he could find.
By December 1903, Langley believed he had perfected a powered flying
machine. Its unveiling would end in complete disaster, however, and he
suffered a stroke shortly afterward, dying a few months later. Samuel
Langley and Bell had devoted 16 years to the pursuit of aviation, and at that
moment it must have seemed to Bell to be as far away as ever.
But the work which Bell and Langley had done proved worthwhile. The
Wright brothers had been working on their own design in secret. In
December 1903 they would make their historic manned, powered flight at
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Though Bell hadn’t been the inventor, he had
produced some prescient work in the field of vertical takeoff helicopter-type
machines. He and Langley had been part of a movement, much ridiculed in
the press, which must have influenced the Wright brothers. They could not
help but be aware of Langley’s work, as the head of the Smithsonian, and
through him of Bell’s work. Their decision to work in secrecy demonstrates
an awareness of how much scorn and derision Langley and Bell had been
targeted with.
Undeterred by the success of the Wright brothers, Bell continued to work
on his own flying machines. Just as he had been driven by his pursuit of the
multiple telegraph and then the telephone, now he was determined that his
kite design would be superior to what the Wright brothers were producing. In
December 1905 he finished the “Frost King” which was made up of 1,500
tetrahedral cells to provide 440 square feet of lifting surface. He was able to
photograph Lucien McCurdy, son of his erstwhile agent and assistant, being
carried off the ground by the machine. This was proof that his design could
lift a man.
At this point Bell gathered a group around him to support him in his
work, he was nearing 60 after all. The first was Douglas McCurdy, an
engineering student at Toronto. When Douglas McCurdy left university for
the Bells, he brought with him Casey Baldwin, another recently graduated
engineer and aviation enthusiast. Baldwin would be set to work using
tetrahedral materials for construction, building an observation tower. This
method of ultra-light, ultra-strong construction would go on to be used for
space-frame architecture designed to cover large areas with few interior
supports. This would be yet another example of a Bell invention that would
go on to have a profound impact on later generations and technologies.
 Because of his wish to add an engine to the Frost King, Bell started
working with Glenn Curtiss who made engines for dirigibles. Bell would
purchase a 16-horsepower motor from Curtiss. The final member of the
aviation team was a young Naval Lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge. They
formed a group called the Aerial Experiment Association to build airplanes
and share the proceeds of all patents. With the exception of Bell and Curtiss,
they were predominantly young men.
They successfully tested the Cygnet, their largest construction ever, on
December 6, 1907, with Selfridge as the pilot. From this point on the group
became dedicated to the construction of planes instead of kites. The first
design constructed was the Red Wing, powered by a 40-horsepower motor
and a propeller at the rear of the aircraft. It became the first plane ever
publicly flown in North America when it was successfully tested on March
17, 1908. The plane eventually crashed and was damaged beyond repair.
Bell reasoned that the weakness of the plane was its inability to bank for
turns and to cope with changes in wind direction. Using observations of birds
as his inspiration, he suggested movable wing segments controlled by the
pilot via wires. These segments, called ailerons, proved crucial to the success
of powered flight. This was an innovation that the Wright brothers had not
thought of but would make use of, as would all planes subsequently
constructed.
The AEA continued to design and test aircraft with their final and most
successful plane being the Silver Dart, which was launched on January 9,
1909. On March 31, 1909, the AEA was wound up. It had achieved what it
had set out to do, namely to prove that manned aviation was not just possible
but would change the world. As he had done to develop the telephone, Bell
demonstrated how well he could work with others and how inspirational a
leader he could be, motivating and driving the young group to their success.
Once again, Bell had stepped into a new field with unshakable conviction.
 Chapter Ten

Later Years and Death

“In scientific research there are no unsuccessful experiments.”

—Alexander Graham Bell

In the later years of his life, Bell continued to create, discover, invent, and
innovate across an array of fields and industries. He embraced the Italian
Montessori school of education, rejecting the rote learning approach adopted
by Western educators in favor of a more child-led approach put forward by
Dr. Maria Montessori.
In 1912 Bell began to teach children important principles of science by
letting them experiment and come up with their own answers. Bell and his
wife founded the Montessori Education Association, with Mabel as its
president. They gained support from the Washington elite in this enterprise
and were able to open a school. The movement which the Bells were
spearheading to bring the Montessori method into the mainstream of
American education would, however, be doomed to failure. Opposition from
the educational mainstream as well as Montessori’s refusal to allow her name
to be used in establishments beyond her control meant that the method didn’t
take off in America. The fledgling MEA closed its school in 1919.
The First World War prompted another Bell innovation that would go
onto to have a far-reaching effect. With the advent of submarine warfare, Bell
came to believe that the Allies needed a large hydrofoil to pursue and destroy
submarines. He had speculated on the subject of a boat that would be able to
travel over instead of through the water as early as 1901, and by 1912 he had
built scale models as part of a design to lift aircraft off the surface of water.
Bell worked on the design of a full-scale hydrodrome with Casey Baldwin,
who had been a member of the AEA. By 1915 they had a model that was
capable of 50 miles per hour, the HD-4. With America joining the war in
Europe in 1917, Bell and Baldwin were given new engines to make their
hydrodrome even faster. Equipped with 350-horsepower engines supplied by
the U.S. government, the HD-4 would eventually achieve speeds of 70-80
miles an hour, a world record.
Bell remained active to the very end of his life, involving himself in
projects through his sixties and seventies too numerous to list. His mind
sparked and fired relentlessly. He wrote about the possibility of utilizing
rooftop space in cities for the capture of solar radiation for energy. He was an
environmental pioneer in his work on the subject of home insulation and
theorized about the effect of greenhouse gases on the environment. He was a
husband, father, and grand-father with a large extended family and had the
pleasure of seeing his children and grand-children succeeding in their own
endeavors. His greatest invention, the telephone, had produced a corporate
megalith in American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) which would shape
the telecoms industry for the next century.
On August 2, 1922, Bell was rapidly weakened and immobilized by an
attack of anemia. He died with Mabel by his side. Her last words to him were
“Don’t leave me.” to which he replied “No.” Unable to talk, Bell’s last words
were signed into his wife’s hand.
 Conclusion
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered today as the inventor of the
telephone. But this was just one invention from a man who could not stop
innovating and creating. A true pioneer, he did not limit himself to any single
field of expertise but instead followed the paths that his mind led him down.
From teacher of the deaf to telephonic innovator and scientific pioneer in the
field of communication with light. His life was one of constant motion,
driven by a mind that did not rest until his last moments.
Many of his inventions were generations or even centuries ahead of their
time. His photophone could not be realized until the invention of fiber optics.
His apparatus for helping with breathing would become the iron lung, his
device for locating metal objects, the metal detector. All would be conceived
of by him but would be brought into being by others. But it was in Bell’s
mind that those ideas first emerged.
He developed the world’s first system for air conditioning, put to use to
cool his Washington home. He theorized on the greenhouse effect and its
impact on global environments. Ever the innovator, he recognized the value
of the Montessori method of education. Bell and his wife’s attempts to bring
this into America were short lived, but today these methods are the
cornerstone of educational systems across western Europe.
Alexander Graham Bell can be summed up in three words: Educator.
Innovator. Inventor.
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