On March 3, 1847, one of the most important characters in modern communications history was born. Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized the conversation and gave the world a number of time saving life changing inventions that continue to make our lives easier.  Many people don’t realize it was Bell’s interest in improving the lives of the deaf that motivated many of his inventions in the telecommunication field.

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and studied at the famous Edinburgh University.  Communication always played a large role in the Scottish physicist’s life as his father was a speech pathologist and taught him about speech impediments and dealing with the issues of the deaf community. The fact that Mrs. Bell, Alexander’s mother was deaf was a motivating factor for both father and son.

Life in the Bell family was both full of curiosity and education as well as personal sorrow. Bell lost both of his brothers to tuberculosis by the age of 23. In 1872, he moved to America and began teaching at the Boston School for the deaf, where he focused his time on teaching his hard of hearing students on how to speak. This was something hardly conceived of at the time. Deafness was nothing new to Bell and in fact he ended up marrying one of his students, Mabel Hubbard. Sound, speech and hearing constantly consumed Bell’s mind and life.

Bell hoped to improve on the telegraph that was invented in 1843 by finding a way to get messages from one telegraph station to another without them having to be taken on foot. He hoped to used tonal noises sent by wire between stations to communicate the text of messages. He was working on this invention (known as the hormonal telegraph) when he met another famous inventor, Thomas Watson.

Watson worked in an electric shop in which he was often assigned to assist would be inventors with their ideas. When working with Bell, the two accidentally transmitted sound through wire using electromagnets. The concept of the telephone was born.

In 1876, Bell patented the idea for his telephone during which time, he improved his concept and rather than just sound being transmitted by wire, Bell discovered how to transmit the human voice by wires. 

The first conversation to take place over the wire systems occurred on March 10, 1876 when Mr. Bell called Mr. Watson to assist him with some spilled battery acid. Watson clearly heard Bell’s voice travel through the wires and came to his assistance.

The first public demonstration of the invention took place in Philadelphia during the same year, causing a stir across both the scientific and lay communities. Rutherford B. Hayes installed a telephone in the Whitehouse two years later and became the first American president to make a phone call.

In the years to come, the Bell Telephone Company (causing competition and several litigious suits from the telegraph companies) would become AT&T, one of the largest and most successful phone companies of all time. When Bell died in 1922, every telephone exchange in the world stopped transmitting for one minute to pay their respects to the man who had started it all.

Bell always considered himself a teacher and not an inventor. His work with deaf students would inspire others, including the famous Helen Keller who dedicated her own biography to him. Today we remember Bell as the inventor of the telephone and forget the steps that lead him to that discovery and the people that inspired his work. Imagining a world without his work is difficult with the telephone being as ubiquitous as the television set or the refrigerator. Inventions become essential to civilization over time and it is hard to imagine they never were.

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Because of Mr. Bell, we can talk to people across the globe, making the world and all its barriers a little smaller and a little easier to climb over.

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