Alexander Graham Bell’s Visionary Invention of the Telephone

THE Russian peasant Piotyr, in Kishinev in 1910, is so astonished by the telephone, which he has just seen in use for the first time, that he asks his better-educated friend Ivan how this amazing invention works.

“Very simple,” Ivan says. “Imagine a dog so large it stretches from Kishinev to Odessa. You step on the dog’s tail in Kishinev and it barks in Odessa. Do you follow that?”

“Yes, I think so,” Piotyr says, hesitantly.

“Good,” Ivan says. “Now remove the dog.”

The target of this joke is the inherent fragility of analogies and metaphors in reasoning. And a superior joke it is, but I would like it a little better if I myself knew how telephones really work. After reading James Mackay’s admirably concise and lucid biography “Alexander Graham Bell” (Wiley; $30), which gives a careful account of the importance of undulatory current, variable resistance, and electromagnetism to the invention of the telephone, I can make a better pretense of comprehending its functioning. But, in truth, the telephone remains, for me, slightly miraculous. Please return the dog.

Not that my ignorance has prevented me from having two telephone lines and five phones in my apartment, and another phone in my car. Like most people, I suppose, I both love and hate the telephone. I absolutely require it, do not easily imagine life without it, yet resent its intrusion into my life.

The painter Jean-Louis Forain, who had one of the first telephones in Paris, invited Edgar Degas over for dinner to show him the new contraption. Degas, good reactionary that he was, was not impressed. Then, in the middle of dinner, the phone rang, causing Forain to leap from his chair to answer it. “Ah,” Degas said. “The telephone. Now I un derstand—it rings, you jump.” Quite so. We jump because we are hopeful that the phone will bring us word of an interesting proposition, one that may—just may—change our lives. More likely nowadays, though, the caller is only someone trying to persuade us to switch to M.C.I.

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, didn’t seem to have much personal use for it himself. He was a night owl and a man who loved solitude (he answered the phone by saying not “Hello” but “Ahoy!”), and he enjoyed few things more than to be alone in nature, where he could dreamily think up new inventions. Inventors are a strange breed: they differ both from scientists and from artists, yet partake of the qualities of each. They tend in general not to be especially well educated, sometimes even in the field of their own work. Bell himself felt deficient in mathematics and in his knowledge of electricity.

Some inventors mine a single rich vein of invention, as Bell seemed to do at first, working in telegraphy and related fields, of which the telephone now seems the logical conclusion. Other inventors will be all over the court. Jerome Murray, for example, who died this past January, was the inventor of the electric carving knife, the audible pressure cooker, the television rotator antenna, the airplane boarding ramp, and—stepping up the significance quotient greatly now— the pump that made open-heart surgery possible. “Science and marketing can be learned,” Murray once remarked, “but inspiration comes from within.” There is something to that, but knowledge of why inspiration strikes some and not others can be acquired only in individual cases. No case, perhaps, is more impressive than that of Alexander Graham Bell, in part because Bell left a voluminous record of his own technological wanderings, and in part because the invention of the telephone has had so momentous an effect on quotidian life.

BELL was the second of three sons born to Melville and Eliza Bell, in Edinburgh, in 1847. Melville Bell was a teacher of elocution, who wrote a popular book entitled “The Standard Elocutionist,” and he had an enduring interest in transforming the findings of phonetics and philology into something he called visible speech, through which he hoped to facilitate global communication. This was no doubt in part because Eliza Bell had become effectively deaf at the age of thirteen, and listened to the world through an ear trumpet. Alexander Bell, in his childhood, had an abundance of talent. He could sightread music and he had a natural scientific bent, which led him to botanizing and to collecting birds’ eggs. He loved animals and was gentle in his treatment of them. Before he was thirteen he had turned his mind to invention, coming up with a machine, for the father of a friend, that scraped the husks off wheat. Nevertheless, Bell was in that class of geniuses who are not very good students. He did the classics as opposed to modern or scientific studies in Edinburgh, and, as his biographer notes, “did not distinguish himself in any way.” He left school at the age of fifteen.

Only under the guidance of his paternal grandfather, in London, with whom he then went to live, did Bell catch intellectual fire. His grandfather read English literature with him, and treated him as an adult. In response, young Bell became precociously mature. He returned to Scotland and at the age of sixteen taught music and elocution to high-school boys, some of whom were older than he was. He then put in a few years at London University concentrating on physiology and anatomy. Among his London acquaintances were James Murray, who would one day become the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Henry Sweet, the grammarian on whom George Bernard Shaw would partly model Professor Henry Higgins. But Bell never finished his course of study. All the degrees he ever received—a dozen, by his biographer’s count—would be honorary ones.

In 1870, Bell’s parents decided to emigrate to America, where Melville Bell’s lectures on visible speech had a large following among educators and the general public. Alexander’s two brothers had died—the younger in 1867, the older in 1870, both of tuberculosis—and, as the only remaining son, he hadn’t much choice but to join his parents. It’s fortunate that he did so. At the age of twenty-three, he was darkly handsome and impressively energetic, but his capacious talents had not yet found their true objects. They did in America, where his first job was teaching at a school for the deaf, in Boston. He excelled at it, taking on a number of private students, with whom he achieved a high rate of success. (His future wife, Mabel Hubbard, was one of them.) He believed in teaching the deaf speech, lipreading, and anything else that would not confine them to depending wholly on sign language. James Mackay reports that Bell always thought his main contribution to humanity was his work with the deaf, and that he always considered himself chiefly a teacher.

Teaching deaf students set Bell to tinkering with inventions connected to sound, among them an electric piano and a multiple telegraph, which would send several messages at once over a single wire. But organization was not his specialty: as a young man, he easily fell into disarray by overcommitting himself. He would work on three or four inventions at once, paying his lab expenses out of his own pocket. Luckily, once he had turned in earnest to working on the telephone, he found an ally in his future father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer who became one of Boston’s most prominent entrepreneurs. Hubbard served Bell as goad, financier, conscience, and guide, and would become a key figure in his discovery.

Bell, however, never let up on his teaching commitments. In 1873, the recently opened Boston University had appointed him professor of vocal physiology and elocution, and he continued to work with private students. Owing to these responsibilities, he was usually able to work on the telephone only at night and on weekends. Bell was a twenty-hour-day man. Under the scourge of such a regimen, he lapsed from time to time into depression of a serious kind. All he had going for him, apart from his friends, were his lucid mind and his excitement about discovery. Something of that excitement is revealed in a letter written to Mabel Hubbard at 2 a.m.:

I try to stop thinking but it’s of no use—I cannot get the reins of my mind! . . . I am only disheartened at the immensity of the horizons opened out to me. . . . I feel like the first mariner in an unknown sea—uncertain which way to go.

Mackay does an excellent job of charting Bell’s various premonitions, errors, important connections, eureka moments—in short, all the steps, faux et vrais, on his way to achieving the invention that was to give him a permanent place in history. But one comes away from his book even more amazed at how easily someone else might have come along to pick up all the prizes, for the invention of the telephone, like that of manned flight, was inevitable. (Robert V. Bruce, who in 1973 wrote a fuller biography of Bell than Mackay’s, noted that all the scientific and technological groundwork was in place for the invention of the telephone by 1846, a year before Bell’s birth.)

A German physicist named Philipp Reis worked on the invention for a while and gave it the name Telephon. (Reis’s work was far less complete than Bell’s, but Mackay reports that, to this day, Reis is regarded as the inventor of the telephone in Germany.) Elisha Gray, who later became a partner in Western Electric, was in almost perpetual competition with Bell over patents—a competition entailing costly litigation, which was in large part dealt with and paid for by Hubbard. Thomas Alva Edison was also on the trail of the telephone. Mackay merely touches on the subject of paranoia in invention—“Every night, [Bell] carefully tidied away his apparatus and locked the cover of his table as a precaution against ‘the hands and eyes of curious domestics,’ though what the household servants would have made of the tangle of wires is anyone’s guess”— but paranoia must be no small part of any inventor’s psychology, especially when he is near to closing in on an important discovery.

Then, on March 10, 1876, Bell placed the first successful telephone call. (“Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you,” he told an assistant in another room.) He had invented the telephone after less than three years of work, and he was not yet thirty years old. Bell turned out to be the man able to put all the technology together thanks to the fortuitous concatenation of his intelligence, his character, his luck, and even his ignorance. (He thought, for example, that if he had known more about electricity, it would only have deterred him from his discovery by sending him down false paths.) In the end, the inventor knew precisely what he had wrought. He wrote in 1878, in an open letter to the newly formed Electric Telephone Company of Great Britain, “The telephone may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in distant places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversation can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.” He added, “The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus consists in the fact that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.”

VICTORY brought about one of the great highs in the history of technology. Word of Bell’s invention spread rapidly. Everyone wanted to see it, hear it, use it. Bell gave lecture-demonstrations that were front-page news. In England, he put on a special demonstration for Queen Victoria: in the Council Room at Osborne House, the monarch, with one of Bell’s early phone receivers pressed to her ear, listened to a rather poor rendition of “God Save the Queen.” Two days later, Sir Thomas Biddulph, her private secretary, wrote Bell to say that she was, in effect, blown away, and would like to buy the two phones used in the demonstration. The inventor sent her, as a gift, two other phones, made of ivory and trimmed in gold.

Squabbles over both foreign and domestic rights began immediately. (U.S. Patent 174,465, which had been formally awarded to Bell on March 10, 1876, was to be, in Mackay’s words, “the most valuable single patent ever issued,” and during the next eighteen years Hubbard, on Bell’s behalf, fought off more than six hundred litigants, all wanting a part of the action.) Western Union, in one of the most impressively stupid business decisions in history, turned down the chance to buy all rights to the telephone for a hundred thousand dollars. Bell, guided chiefly by Hubbard, then formed the Bell Telephone Company, with several other partners, and his financial worries were over.

So were his domestic ones. He had put off his marriage to Mabel Hubbard until the telephone race was won. They finally married a year after his patent came through, and, as a wedding present, Bell turned all but ten of his fifteen hundred shares, or about one-third ownership of the Bell Telephone Company, over to his wife. He knew the want of money, he knew what money could do, but he seems to have been very little interested in it otherwise. His biographer remarks that he was never, technically, a multimillionaire. But before Bell was forty he and his wife had enough money to live exactly as they pleased. The couple, who had two daughters (two sons died in infancy), lived in grand homes in Washington, D.C., and in Nova Scotia, the latter one a mansion high on a hill overlooking the Bras d’Or Lakes. He indulged in foreign travel, in generosity to the intellectually deserving, and in his own (sometimes slightly whimsical) research—spending, for example, vast sums on monstrously large kites when he became interested in aviation.

Despite Bell’s apparent happiness, not long after the triumph of the telephone his weight shot up from a hundred and sixty pounds to two hundred and fourteen. His hair began to turn prematurely white; he let his now white beard grow long. He and his father were often taken for brothers, and so they appear in photographs from this period. Alexander Graham Bell had a little problem: by the time he was thirty, he had achieved a success that he was unlikely ever to top, and he was well aware of it. But a spirit as energetic as Bell’s could not be content to rest on past achievement. He wrote to his wife from Europe, “Make me work . . . at anything, it doesn’t matter what, only make me work so that I may be accomplishing something.”

Beginning in 1881, Bell put sixty thousand dollars into the founding of Science, the magazine that later became the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Several years later, his father-in-law founded the National Geographic Society, and it was Bell’s idea to make the society’s publication, The National Geographic Magazine, more popular in style and to use photographs more lavishly, including its first photograph of a bare-breasted woman—a Filipina harvesting rice—which ran at Bell’s insistence. After Hubbard’s death, in 1897, Bell became the president of the society, and over the years wrote for the magazine, sometimes under the anagrammatic pen name of H. A. Largelamb.

He began paying stipends to young scientists whose work showed promise, among them Albert Michelson, the University of Chicago physicist who later won a Nobel Prize. The education of the deaf remained a continuing passion, and he engaged in a persistent battle over it with Edward Gallaudet, the director of the first national school for the deaf. Gallaudet believed that sign language should be the principal tool for teaching the deaf and that deaf students learned best from deaf teachers. Bell always favored a system of education that would integrate the deaf into the world of the hearing as closely as possible, in the way his own wife was fully integrated. He befriended Helen Keller with personal encouragement and financial aid, and she dedicated her autobiography to him.

Through all this, Bell’s inventions continued to absorb him. In 1882, he made his great medical invention: he called it the “vacuum jacket,” but it became better known as the iron lung. He helped perfect the gramophone, which Edison had recently invented. He worked on a hydrofoil boat; he became interested in helicopters; he bred sheep, with an eye to eugenic experiment, hoping to produce a twin-bearing breed; and, near the end of his life, hoping to aid shipwreck survivors, he struggled without success to find a way of converting sea fog into drinking water. His working day began at noon and finished at 4 a.m., and in Nova Scotia he often rambled alone through the countryside, thinking till dawn.

When Bell was in his seventies, he told a journalist, “There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.” That worked for Bell, but then almost everything did. Wealth, great fame, astonishing achievement, the uncomplicated love of his family—all were his, and the truth seems to be that he deserved them. He was a remarkable man, good-hearted and honorable in every way. When he died, in 1922—of the effects of diabetes, at the age of seventy-five—his last words to his wife, informing her that he would never leave her, were in sign language.

Alexander Graham Bell’s early ambitions for the telephone were visionary. He imagined intercontinental calls and lived to hear transcontinental ones. But not even he could have imagined the pervasive, predominant role that his invention would play in modern life. On August 4, 1922, the day of his funeral in Nova Scotia, all telephone communication in the United States was shut down in his honor, for one minute, at exactly 6:25 p.m. Try to recall that later this week when, at around the same time, you get another infuriating telemarketing call. ♦