Inventors

by Philip Gengembre Hubert

Professor Bell Sending the First Message, by Long-distance Telephone, from New York to Chicago.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, the eminent English electrician, while engaged in perfecting his system of telegraphy discovered that wires charged with electricity often carried noises in a curious manner. He made and exhibited at the Royal Society, in 1840, a clock in which the tick of another clock miles away was conveyed through a wire. This experiment appears to have been one of the germs of the telephone. In 1844 Captain John Taylor, also an Englishman, invented an instrument to which he gave the name of the telephone, but it had nothing electrical about it. It was an apparatus for conveying sounds at sea by means of compressed air forced through trumpets. He could make his telephone heard six miles away. The first real suggestion of the telephone as we know it comes from Reis, the German professor of physics at Friedrichsdorf, who in 1860 constructed with a coil of wire, a knitting-needle, the skin of a German sausage, the bung of a beer-barrel, and a strip of platinum an instrument which reproduced the sound of the voice by the vibration of the membrane and sent a series of clicks along an electric wire to an electro-magnetic receiver at the other end of the wire. The same idea was taken up in this country by Elisha Gray, Edison, and by Alexander Graham Bell, who first exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition an apparatus that transmitted speech by electricity in a fairly satisfactory manner. The American claimants to the honor of having invented the telephone include Daniel Drawbaugh, a backwoods genius of Pennsylvania, who claims to have made and used a practical telephone in 1867-68. A large fortune has been spent in fighting Drawbaugh's claims against the Bell monopoly, but the courts have finally decided in favor of the latter. It should be recorded as a matter of justice to Mr. Gray, that he appears to have solved the problem of conveying speech by electricity at about the same time as Bell. Both these inventors filed their caveats upon the telephone upon the same day—February 14, 1876. It was Bell's good fortune to be the first to make his device practically effective.

Alexander Graham Bell is not an American by birth. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the 1st of March, 1847. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was the inventor of the system by which deaf people are enabled to read speech more or less correctly by observing the motion of the lips. His mother was the daughter of Samuel Symonds, a surgeon in the British navy.

In 1872 the Bells moved to Canada, and young Alexander Bell became widely known in Boston as an authority in the teaching of the deaf and dumb. He first carried to great perfection in this country the art of enabling the deaf and dumb to enunciate intelligible words and sounds that they themselves have never heard. Most of his art he acquired from his father, one of the most expert of teachers in this field. The elder Bell is still active in his work, constantly devising new methods and experiments. He lives in Washington with his son and is frequently heard in lectures in New York and Boston.

In 1873 Alexander Bell began to study the transmission of musical tones by telegraph. It was in the line of his work with deaf and dumb people to make sound vibrations visible to the eye. With the phonautograph he could obtain tracings of such vibrations upon blackened paper by means of a pencil or stylus attached to a vibrating cord or membrane. He also succeeded in obtaining tracings upon smoked glass of the vibrations of the air produced by vowel sounds. He began experimenting with an apparatus resembling the human ear, and upon the suggestion of Dr. Clarence J. Blake, the Boston aurist, he tried his work upon a prepared specimen of the ear itself. Observation upon the vibrations of the various bones within the ear led him to conceive the idea of vibrating a piece of iron in front of an electro-magnet.

Mr. Bell was at this time an instructor in phonetics, or the art of visible speech, in Monroe's School of Oratory in Boston. One of his old pupils describes him then as a swarthy, foreign-looking personage, more Italian than English in appearance, with jet-black hair and dark skin. His manner was earnest and full of conviction. He was an enthusiast in his work, and only emerged from his habitual diffidence when called upon to talk upon his studies and views. He was miserably poor and almost without friends. When he was attacked with muscular rheumatism, in 1873, his hospital expenses were paid by his employer, and his only visitors were some of the pupils at the school.

Until the close of 1874, Bell's experiments seemed to promise nothing of practical value. But in 1875 he began to transmit vibrations between two armatures, one at each end of a wire. He was much interested at the time in multiple telegraphy and fancied that something might come of some such arrangement of many magnetic armatures responding to the vibrations set up in one.

In November, 1875, he discovered that the vibrations created in a reed by the voice could be transmitted so as to reproduce words and sounds. One day in January, 1876, he called a dozen of the pupils at Monroe's school into his room and exhibited an apparatus by which singing was more or less satisfactorily transmitted by wire from the cellar of the building to a room on the fourth floor. The exhibition created a sensation among the pupils, but, although no attempts were made by Bell to conceal what he was doing, or how he did it, the noise of his discovery does not seem to have reached the outside world. With an old cigar-box, two hundred feet of wire, two magnets from a toy fish-pond, the first Bell telephone was brought into existence. The apparatus was, however, not yet the practical telephone as we know it, but it was sufficient of a curiosity to warrant its exhibition in an improved form at the Centennial Exhibition, when Sir William Thomson spoke of it as "perhaps the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph."