Effect of Alexander Graham Bell on Today’s Society, with Bibliography

The importance of Alexander Graham Bell on today’s society is visible, or rather audible, everywhere. First and most importantly, Alexander Graham Bell was a prolific teacher of the deaf. He considered this to be his true life’s work, but only one of the many important things he did. With his great research of speech and sound, he would become one of the greatest inventors of all time. His own definition of an inventor is “a man who looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world.” suits him well. Every thing that he did had an impact on someone, and it was true that he wanted to improve the world.

Alexander Graham Bell was born Aleck Bell in Edinburgh, Scotland, Melville and Eliza Symonds Bell. His father, Melville Bell, invented Visible Speech, a code of symbols for all spoken sounds that was used in teaching deaf people to speak. His mother, Eliza Bell, was deaf, this lead Melville and Alexander to exploration in the subject of teaching deaf people. Alexander Bell studied at Edinburgh University in 1864 and worked with his father at University College, London, from 1868-70. During this time, he became deeply interested in the study of sound and the mechanics of speech, inspired in part by the audio experiments of German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz, which gave Bell the idea of telegraphing speech.

When young Bell’s two brothers died of tuberculosis, Melville Bell took his family to the healthier climate of Canada in 1870. From there, Aleck Bell went to Boston, Massachusetts and in 1871 and joined the staff of the Boston School for the Deaf. In 1872, Bell opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf. In 1873 he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, and he also tutored students as a side job.

Bell’s interest in speech and communication inspired him to research the transmission of sound over wires. In particular, he experimented with development of the harmonic telegraph, a device that could send multiple messages at the same time over a wire. Bell also worked with the idea of transmitting the human voice, which at that time, was not yet possible, experimenting with vibrating membranes and an actual human ear. Bell even manipulated his dog’s vocal cords so that when the dog barked it made sounds that were like words instead of barks. Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, fathers of two of his pupils supported Bell financially in his research.

Early in 1874 Bell met Thomas A. Watson, a young worker at a Boston electrical shop. Watson became Bell’s vital assistant. Watson gave Bell’s experiments the crucial ingredient that had been lacking, his technical know-how in electrical engineering. Together the two men spent hours-on-end experimenting. Although Bell formed the basic concept of the telephone using a varying but unbroken electric current to transmit the sound waves of human speech, in the summer of 1874, Hubbard insisted that Bell focus his efforts on the harmonic telegraph instead. Bell wanted to continue his work on the telephone but he gave in. When he patented a telegraph design in February 1875, he found that Elisha Gray had patented a multiple telegraph two days earlier. Greatly discouraged, Bell talked to in Washington with Joseph Henry, who urged Bell to pursue his “germ of a great invention” speech transmission.

Back in Boston, Bell and Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph, but still with the telephone in mind. By accident on a June day in 1875, an intermittent transmitter made a steady current and transmitted sound, when Watson tightened or loosened a screw it produced a sound that would vary in pitch. Bell had proof of his 1874 idea; he sketched a design for an electric telephone, and Watson built it. Bell and Watson experimented all summer, but failed actually to transmit voice sounds. That fall, Bell began to write down the patent specifications, but delayed application; Hubbard finally filed for the patent on February 14, 1876, just hours before Gray showed up at the same patent office to file an intent to patent his telephone design. Bell’s patent was granted on March 7, 1876, and on March 10, the first message transmitted by telephone passed from Bell to Watson in their workshop: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!”.

After a year of working on the telephone, Watson and Bell, along with Hubbard and Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell immediately married Mabel Hubbard, and went to England to promote his telephone.

Bell Telephone Company grew fast and Bell became a rich man. He turned to other interests on his return to the United States in 1879. He also had to defend his patents against frequent lawsuits. The French government awarded Bell with the Volta prize, a prize rarely given out. It was set up by the first Napoleon