The assistant obeyed him, and again came that faint twang from the spring in the front room. The telephone was born!
And the man who accomplished this wonder was a poor young professor of elocution in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell. He was not an American by birth. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 1, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of a system by which the deaf can read speech by observing the motion of the lips.
The Bell family moved to Canada in 1870, and Alexander, the younger, took up teaching the deaf and dumb in Boston. He became instructor of phonetics, or the science of articulate sound, in Monroe’s School of Oratory. He was a hard worker, but poor. One time when he had rheumatism his employer had to pay his hospital expenses.
It was about this time that Bell began experimenting with the transmission of sound by electricity. For a number of years other people had been trying to do this. Sir Charles Wheatstone in England had discovered that wires charged with electricity often carried noises in a curious way. In 1869 Reis, a German professor, constructed an instrument that sent a series of clicks along an electric wire to an electromagnetic receiver at the other end. And others were turning their attention to this interesting phase of telegraphy.
But it was Alexander Graham Bell who first succeeded in grasping the correct idea. A few months after the incident described above, on a day in January, 1876, he called some of his pupils into a room and showed them an instrument that transmitted singing from the cellar of the building to where they were on the fourth floor.
People were at first slow to appreciate the importance of this great invention: but gradually they came to see its value, and today there are over seven million telephones in use in the United States alone.
Money and honors have poured in upon the inventor, who still lives to enjoy his triumph. His income is said to be more than $1,000,000 a year. In 1880 the French government awarded him the Volta prize of $10,000, and two years later he received from the same country the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 29, SERIAL No. 29
