Thomas
Edison | Alexander Bell |
Eli Whitney
ALEXANDER
GRAHAM BELL
Inventor
of The Telephone
http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H/graham_bell.html
When the
word "inventor" is mentioned, Alexander Graham Bell,
creator of the telephone, is undoubtedly one of the first
names that springs to mind.
Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and
educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated
to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. He was
an early student of sound and speech, inspired, perhaps, by
the fact that his mother, Eliza, was almost totally deaf and
his father, Melville, developed the first international phonetic
alphabet. In his early 20s Bell himself taught deaf children
to speak and gave speech lessons at schools in his community.
As a boy, Bell built a speaking robot, and found that he could
touch his dog's throat in ways that seemed to form his barks
and growls into words. Once, he successfully obtained a human
ear from a medical school, which he used to conduct experiments
tracing sound patterns. Bell was also a gifted pianist, who
learned to discriminate pitch very well. As a teenager, he
noticed that a chord struck on a piano in one room would be
echoed by a piano in another room. He realized that chords
could be transmitted through the air, vibrating at the other
end at exactly the same pitch.
With this
discovery, Bell set out to develop a multiple telegraph, using
Morse code to convey several messages simultaneously, each
at a different pitch. He knew his greatest challenge would
be finding a way to convey pitch across a wire. He ascertained,
eventually, that this could be accomplished by reproducing
sound waves in a continuous, undulating current. That's when
he realized that this could also apply to human speech, which
is composed of many complex sound vibrations.
In 1875,
Bell developed his first version of what came to be known
as the telephone. He received a patent for it on March 7,
1876, just after his 29th birthday. Five days later, on March
12, he tested his device, speaking into the phone to his associate,
Thomas Watson, when he said, "Mr. Watson, come here.
I want to see you."
Bell first
demonstrated his most famous invention on June 25, 1876 at
the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. There, he showed
that the sound of the human voice could be reproduced, which
confirmed his theory that speech patterns can be made to change
the intensity of an electrical current.
A year
after Bell's initial public demonstration, he placed the world's
first phone call over telegraph wires between two towns in
Ontario, Canada -- a span of eight miles. Just two months
later, the long-distance reach of telephone technology was
expanded to 143 miles. Today, of course, telephone calls may
be placed to virtually any location around the globe. The
Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 to bring telephones
to the masses. The company provided the foundation for today's
telecommunications industry.
While
Bell is best known for his telephone invention, he worked
on hundreds of projects throughout his life and received a
number of patents in various fields.
In 1880, Bell, patented the photophone, in which his telephone
principle was applied to transmit words on a beam of light.
This has been recognized as the first wireless transmission
of speech. Not until more than a century later would this
idea have any widespread use: the principles behind the process
enabled the development of what we know today as the cellular
phone.
Bell was
also an aviation enthusiast. He worked on designs for airplanes,
kites and helicopters with members of the Aerial Experiment
Association. In 1909, Bell's Silver Dart airplane few for
a half mile in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, six years after the Wright
Brothers took their first flight in North Carolina. Later
Bell developed the tetrahedron while he worked on the design
for a kite that could carry a man. The figure, made up of
four equilateral triangles, is one of nature¹s most stable
structures and forms the basis for many modern bridges and
towers. At the age of 75, Bell received a patent on one of
the fastest watercraft in the world, the HD-4.
To sum up his approach to invention, Bell once said, "Leave
the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods.
Every time you do you will be certain to find something that
you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around
it, and before you know it, you will have something worth
thinking about to occupy your mind."
Bell's
notebooks are still available for public consultation. Researchers
believe his early ideas may still hold clues that can help
provide the solutions for modern technological problems. To
view Bells notebooks for yourself, visit http://www.indiana.edu/~ctwardy/.
For more information on the history of telephone, visit PBS'
"American Experience" special online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/telephone/.
Thomas
Edison | Alexander Bell |
Eli Whitney
|