The First Electronic Church of America
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) was a contemporary of James Clerk Maxwell, and, like Maxwell, was born in Scotland and educated in England. But while Maxwell was primarily a mathematical theoretician, Bell liked to make things. For two generations, his family had been leading authorities in elocution and speech, and, after the Bells moved to America in 1870, Graham Bell himself set up his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf, and then he became a professor of speech and vocal physiology at Boston University, where he specialized in teaching deaf-mutes to talk. In an age when the likes of Michael Faraday and Maxwell were beginning to plumb the secrets of an electronic universe, it wasn't much of a stretch for Bell to move from the mechanics of speech into the electrics of speech.
As a speech therapist, he was, of course, dealing with waves -- sound waves -- and their reception. These waves did not travel very far, or very fast. But, he reasoned, if he could convert the sound of human speech into electrical oscillations, those sounds could be sent over wires, and then converted back into sound waves at the receiving end. He theorized that if he could find a way to make an electric current vary in intensity precisely as air varies in density during the production of sound, he could transmit speech. He had moved from speech therapy into one of the great human inventions of all time, one that would bring people together and shrink the planet itself.
It wasn't long before Bell and an assistant, Thomas A. Watson, were trying to develop an apparatus for electrical transmission of the spoken word. Over a five-year period, they built a number of machines that turned words into strange noises that meant nothing. Then, one day, on March 10, 1876, when Bell was in the middle of an experiment, he overturned a jar of acid. "Mr. Watson," he said. "Come here. I want you." In a nearby room, Watson heard the words coming out of one his machines. It was Bell's voice. He raced to Bell's side, shouting, "I can hear you. I can hear the words."
Bell had applied for a U.S. patent 25 days before that event, sure that his tinkering with Watson would bring eventual success. When it did, he (like many inventors) found that his patent would be contested in the federal courts for two decades, the most involved patent litigation in history. But the telephone was finally determined by the U.S. Supreme Court to be Bell's and Bell's alone.
The telephone was an invention that contributed much to the development and service of radio. Radio adopted the magnetic telephone receiver as its universal earphone, and the microphone had its birth in telephony. Wires helped radio make its flight into space. And then radio returned a favor: the radio-electron tube became a key to the advance telephone engineering.
Bell soon moved to Washington (possibly so that he could be closer to the battlefields where his patent war was being fought) and he continued his experiments in communication. He invented the photophone, transmission of sound on a beam of light, and the graphophone, a practical approach to sound recording.
In 1877, he married one of his former students, Mabel Hubbard, whose father was the founder of the National Geographic Society. It was Bell who suggested that geography could be taught best through pictures, and he sought to promote an understanding of life in distant lands at a time when travel was limited to the privileged few. Under his future son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, Bell's vision became the National Geographic Magazine.
At the turn of the century, Bell became interested in a host of other endeavors. He experimented with giant, man-carrying kites, with sonar detection, solar distillation, the tetrahedron as a structural unit, and the hydrofoil boat.
The year Bell died, in 1922, there were more than 14 million telephones in the U.S. There are now twice that many in California alone.