It’s tough to imagine a time when the ubiquitous phone was not around, right? It was about140 years ago that the first sentence was spoken over the telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” Alexander Graham Bell told his assistant, Thomas A. Watson. As Dr. Watson was to Sherlock Holmes, so was Thomas Watson to Graham Bell, but both were scientists and they worked on the design and patent of the first practical telephone.
The beginning
Alexander was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, as the second of three sons to his parents. Since both Melville and Edward had middle names and he didn’t, he got himself one at the age of 10: Graham. Quite the little inventor, even before he entered his teens he had come up with a device to de-husk wheat for his neighbour’s grain mill. The gadget was used for years in the mill.
Eliza Bell, his mother, encouraged him in literature and music. Alexander became the family pianist. His father and grandfather were experts on the mechanics of voice and elocution. At 16, he and his brother tried their hand at building a talking robot. It was at that time he joined his father in his work for the hearing impaired. He was deeply affected by his mother’s gradual hearing loss. When tuberculosis claimed the lives of both his brothers, his father decided to move to America. Once in Brantford, Ontario, Alexander’s health improved dramatically.
He began trying his hand at a device for telegraph transmission of several messages. Then he got interested in transmitting human voice by electricity. Thomas Watson teamed up with him in this venture. On March 10, 1876, Graham Bell made the first phone call. At an exhibition in Philadelphia, Bell demonstrated the telephone and Brazil’s Emperor Don Pedro II exclaimed in delight, “My God, it talks!” A microphone, invention of Thomas Edison, was added to the gadget and one didn’t have to shout any more on the phone to be heard!
Within ten years of the invention, over 1,05,000 people in the U.S. alone owned a telephone and Bell became a hero. For all that Bell didn’t have a phone as he didn’t want to be distracted from his scientific work! He would describe himself simply as “teacher of the deaf” and his contribution in that field is immense. His wife Mabel was a former student of his who’d lost her hearing to scarlet fever when very young. He crusaded for the hearing impaired encouraging their integration into society. He had 18 patents to his credit besides 12 more with collaborators.
When Bell died, in 1922, at the age of 75, due to complications from diabetes, the entire telephone system shut down in the U.S. for one minute in tribute to him.
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