For a minute on August 4, 1922, not a single telephone bell rang in the U.S. and Canada. Even though there were more than 10 million active telephones in the region at that time, there wasn’t a single phone call or conversation in that minute as the service was silenced. It was a mark of respect for Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who had died on August 2 and whose funeral took place on August 4.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847, Bell was educated there and in London, but didn’t complete his studies, both in school and college. He was inspired by his father and grandfather, who were both authorities on elocution and sound mechanics, and took to it himself when he became a teacher for the hearing impaired.
The deaths of two of Bell’s brothers to illness forced the family to move to Canada in 1870 and Bell shifted to Boston, the U.S., a year later. He founded a school here to train teachers for the hearing impaired and it eventually became a part of Boston University.
Swift action
During this time, he researched sending several telegraph messages simultaneously over a single wire. The idea of transmitting speech had always fascinated Bell and this research led him to that, as he developed the telephone along with his able assistant Thomas Watson.
From receiving a patent for his device on March 7, 1876 to performing a demonstration with Watson three days later, Bell was quick to act on his telephone as he fast-tracked the process to get his device to the market. Parallel claims and lengthy legal battles ensued, but Bell’s patent received priority in the end.
Other inventions
What this effectively meant was that Bell was a wealthy man while still in his early 30s. With his interest in telephones waning and the business aspect not quite exciting him, Bell chose to move away. He invested part of his fortune into a scientific facility that, among others, aimed at improving the lives of the hearing impaired, and also got to work himself.
Following the shooting of the U.S. President James A. Garfield in July 1881, Bell got to work on what he called an electrical bullet probe. He did this by using induction balance, something that he had learnt about while previously trying to cancel out electrical interference on telephone wires, to emit a tone when in close proximity with a metal object – an early precursor of metal detectors.
He improvised on American inventor Thomas Edison’s phonograph and received a patent in 1886 for his graphophone, a device that could record and playback sound. Bell was drawn towards aviation as well and continued experimenting in the field even after the Wright brothers had successfully achieved powered, controlled flight in 1903.
Apart from his own experimenting and research, Bell was also involved in advancing scientific knowledge. He was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society in 1888, served as its president during the turn of the century and was involved in making the society’s journal National Geographic , a prominent publication. He also helped launch and support the journal Science that later became the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Despite all his success, Bell always saw himself as a teacher of the hearing impaired. Months before his death, Bell, on his 75th birthday, revealed that he never had a telephone in his own study, seeing it possibly as a distraction during his work. Do you think you would be able to stay away from your smartphones, now or in your adulthood, for the sake of your work?
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What happened to the first telephone?
For decades after Bell’s death, the whereabouts of Telephone Number One, or the first working telephone, was unknown.
Bell had gifted the first telephone to his childhood friend James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary , in gratitude for teaching him acoustics and electricity during their Edinburgh days.
Murray had left this device at his Oxford house attic. But when this attic was searched in the 1980s when it was learnt that it could house Telephone Number One, nothing was found.
It is believed that soldiers who had stayed in the house during World War II had used everything that they could find in the attic as firewood to keep themselves warm on an especially cold day. If this were true, the first telephone could well have gone up in flames!
