Masters of Space / Morse and the Telegraph; Thompson and the Cable; Bell and the Telephone; Marconi and the Wireless Telegraph; Carty and the Wireless Telephone

by Walter Kellogg Towers

In common with other experimenters who were searching for the telephone, Bell was experimenting with a sort of musical telegraph. Eagerly and persistently he sought the means that would replace the telegraph with its cumbersome signals by a new device which would enable the human voice itself to be transmitted. The longer he worked the greater did the difficulties appear. His work with the deaf and dumb was alluring, and on many occasions he seriously considered giving over his other experiments and devoting himself entirely to the instruction of the deaf and dumb and to the development of his system of making speech visible by making the sound-vibrations visible to the eye. But as he mused over the difficulties in enabling a deaf mute to achieve speech nothing else seemed impossible. "If I can make a deaf mute talk," said Bell, "I can make iron talk."

One of his early ideas was to install a harp at one end of the wire and a speaking-trumpet at the other. His plan was to transmit the vibrations over the wire and have the voice reproduced by the vibrations of the strings of the harp. By attaching a light pencil or marker to a cord or membrane and causing the latter to vibrate by talking against it, he could secure tracings of the sound-vibrations. Different tracings were secured from different sounds. He thus sought to teach the deaf to speak by sight.

At this time Bell enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Clarence J. Blake, an eminent Boston aurist, who suggested that the experiments be conducted with a human ear instead of with a mechanical apparatus in imitation of the ear. Bell eagerly accepted the idea, and Doctor Blake provided him with an ear and connecting organs cut from a dead man's head. Bell soon had the ghastly specimen set up in his workshop. He moistened the drum with glycerine and water and, substituting a stylus of hay for the stapes bone, he obtained a wonderful series of curves which showed the vibrations of the human voice as recorded by the ear. One can scarce imagine a stranger picture than Bell must have presented in the conduct of those experiments. We can almost see him with his face the paler in contrast with his black hair and flashing black eyes as he shouted and whispered by turns into the ghastly ear. Surely he must have looked the madman, and it is perhaps fortunate that he was not observed by impressionable members of the public else they would have been convinced that the witches had again visited old Salem town to ply their magic anew. But it was a new and very real and practical sort of magic which was being worked there.

His experiments with the dead man's ear brought to Bell at least one important idea. He noted that, though the ear-drum was thin and light, it was capable of sending vibrations through the heavy bones that lay back of it. And so he thought of using iron disks or membranes to serve the purpose of the drum in the ear and arrange them so that they would vibrate an iron rod. He thought of connecting two such instruments with an electrified wire, one of which would receive the sound-vibrations and the other of which would reproduce them after they had been transmitted along the wire. At last the experimenter was on the right track, with a conception of a practicable method of transmitting sound. He now possessed a theoretical knowledge of what the telephone he sought should be, but there yet remained before him the enormous task of devising and constructing the apparatus which would carry out the idea, and find the best way of utilizing the electrical current for this work.

Bell was now at a critical point in his career and was confronted by the same difficulty which assails so many inventors. In his constant efforts to achieve a telephone he had entirely neglected his school of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that unless he would devote himself entirely to the improvement of this instrument and cease wasting time and money over ear toys that had no commercial value they would no longer give him financial support. Hubbard went even further, and insisted that if Bell did not abandon his foolish notions he could not marry his daughter.

Bell was almost without funds, his closest friends now seemed to turn upon him, and altogether he was in a sorry plight. Of course Sanders and Hubbard meant the best, yet in reality they were seeking to drive their protégé in exactly the wrong direction. As far back as 1860 a German scientist named Philipp Reis produced a musical telephone that even transmitted a few imperfect words. But it would not talk successfully. Others had followed in his footsteps, using the musical telephone to transmit messages with the Morse code by means of long and short hums. Elisha Gray, of Chicago, also experimented with the musical telegraph. At the transmitting end a vibrating steel tongue served to interrupt the electric current which passed over the wire in waves, and, passing through the coils of an electro-magnet at the receiving end, caused another strip of steel located near the magnet to vibrate and so produce a tone which varied with the current.

All of these developments depended upon the interruption of the current by some kind of a vibrating contact. The limitations which Sanders and Hubbard sought to impose upon Bell, had they been obeyed to the letter, must have prevented his ultimate success. In a letter to his mother at this time, he said:

I am now beginning to realize the cares and anxieties of being an inventor. I have had to put off all pupils and classes, for flesh and blood could not stand much longer such a strain as I have had upon me.

But good fortune was destined to come to Bell along with the bad. On an enforced trip to Washington to consult his patent attorney—a trip he could scarce raise funds to make—Bell met Prof. Joseph Henry. We have seen the part which this eminent scientist had played in the development of the telegraph. Now he was destined to aid Bell, as he had aided Morse a generation earlier. The two men spent a day over the apparatus which Bell had with him. Though Professor Henry was fifty years his senior and the leading scientist in America, the youth was able to demonstrate that he had made a real discovery.

"You are in possession of the germ of a great invention," said Henry, "and I would advise you to work at it until you have made it complete."