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Alexander Graham Bell
Design sketch of the phone.
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More of this Feature
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• The History of the Telephone
• Alexander Graham Bell - Photophone
• Alexander Graham Bell - More Biographies and
Pictures
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In
1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone. In
1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company, and in the same year married
Mabel Hubbard and embarked on a yearlong honeymoon in Europe.
Alexander Graham Bell might easily have been
content with the success of his telephone invention. His many laboratory
notebooks demonstrate, however, that he was driven by a genuine and rare
intellectual curiosity that kept him regularly searching, striving, and
wanting always to learn and to create. He would continue to test out new
ideas through a long and productive life. He would explore the realm of
communications as well as engage in a great variety of scientific activities
involving kites, airplanes, tetrahedral structures, sheep-breeding,
artificial respiration, desalinization and water distillation, and
hydrofoils.
 With the enormous technical and later
financial success of his telephone invention, Alexander Graham Bell's future
was secure, and he was able to arrange his life so that he could devote
himself to his scientific interests. Toward this end, in 1881, he used the
$10,000 award for winning France's
Volta Prize to set up the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
A believer in scientific teamwork, Bell
worked with two associates, his cousin Chichester
Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, at the Volta
Laboratory. Their experiments soon produced such major improvements in Thomas
Edison's phonograph that it became commercially viable. After 1885, when he
first visited Nova Scotia, Bell set up another laboratory there at his
estate, Beinn Bhreagh
(pronounced Ben Vreeah), near Baddeck,
where he would assemble other teams of bright young engineers to pursue new
and exciting ideas.
Among one of his first innovations after the telephone was the "photophone," a device that enabled
sound to be transmitted on a beam of light. Bell and his assistant, Charles Sumner Tainter, developed the photophone
using a sensitive selenium crystal and a mirror that would vibrate in
response to a sound. In 1881, they successfully sent a photophone
message over 200 yards
from one building to another. Bell
regarded the photophone as "the greatest
invention I have ever made; greater than the telephone." Alexander
Graham Bell's invention reveals the principle upon which today's laser and
fiber optic communication systems are founded, though it would take the
development of several modern technologies to realize it fully.
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Alexander Graham Bell
Sketch of a vacuum jacket in use.
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Over the years, Alexander Graham Bell's curiosity would lead him to
speculate on the nature of heredity, first among the deaf and later with
sheep born with genetic irregularities. His sheep-breeding experiments at Beinn Bhreagh sought to
increase the numbers of twin and triplet births. Bell was also willing to attempt inventing
under the pressure of daily events, and in 1881 he hastily constructed an
electromagnetic device called an induction balance to try and locate a bullet
lodged in President Garfield after an assassin had shot him. He later
improved this and produced a device called a telephone probe, which would
make a telephone receiver click when it touched metal. That same year, Bell's newborn son, Edward, died from respiratory
problems, and Bell
responded to that tragedy by designing a metal vacuum jacket that would
facilitate breathing. This apparatus was a forerunner of the iron lung used
in the 1950s to aid polio victims. In addition to inventing the audiometer to
detect minor hearing problems and conducting experiments with what today are
called energy recycling and alternative fuels, Bell also worked on methods of
removing salt from seawater.
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Photograph of the Silver Dart
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However, these interests may be
considered minor activities compared to the time and effort he put into the
challenge of flight. By the 1890s, Bell
had begun experimenting with propellers and kites. His work led him to apply
the concept of the tetrahedron (a solid figure with four triangular faces) to
kite design as well as to create a new form of architecture. In 1907, four years
after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, Bell formed the Aerial Experiment
Association with Glenn Curtiss, William
"Casey" Baldwin, Thomas Selfridge, and
J.A.D. McCurdy, four young engineers whose common goal was to create airborne
vehicles. By 1909, the group had produced four powered aircraft, the best of
which, the Silver Dart, made the first successful powered flight in Canada on
February 23, 1909. Bell
spent the last decade of his life improving hydrofoil designs, and in 1919 he
and Casey Baldwin built a hydrofoil that set a world water-speed record that
was not broken until 1963. Months before he died, Bell told a reporter, "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.
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