Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, 1876
On the 14 February 1876, Lawyers Bell and Elisha Gray contacted
the US patents Office within a few hours of each other. Bell’s lawyer lodged a
patent; Gray’s gave notice that one would be lodged within three months. Their
clients had invented simultaneously and independently, devices to send sounds,
including speech, as an electric current on a wire. For reasons of priority,
Bell got the patent; Gray did not, despite the backing of the telegraph company
Western Union. So Bell is the name we remember.
The two men had very different backgrounds. Bell was the Scotish
born son of a university professor, trained in medicine and with expertise
working with deaf children. Gray was a Quaker from rural Ohio, and had worked
as a blacksmith, boat builder and carpenter, later paying his way through
college to win a two year science degree.
Both had worked to improve the operation of the 40 year old
electric telegraph, such as developing ways to send more than one message at a
time. Both had devised systems that made an electric current vary in synchrony
with the munute changes in air pressure that constitutes sound. In Bell’s
design, a metal diaphragm responded to the pressure changes and moved a coil of
wire near a magnet. The movements induced a varying electric current. At the
receiver, those changing currents powered an electromagnet, which pulled a
second diaphragm to and fro, simulating the original sound. That is how Bell’s
assistant, the electrician Thomas Watson, heard the boss calling from several
rooms away, ‘Mr Watson, come here, I need to see you’ not through the air but
over the wire.
History of Telephone Invention:
Bell and Gray were not alone in this field. The German Johann
Philipp Reis, among others, had already built primitive devices; still others
would make improvements on Bell’s design. In 1877 Thomas Edison replaced the
coil and magnet receiver with one containing a button of carbon, improving
fidelity. Even so, the telephone was not quite ready for mass use. Over the
next few years, Bel, Watson, and others added a hand crank to signal down the
line that a call was being made and put the receiver and transmitter on a
common handle. This hand piece hung on a hook; lifting it opened the line to
the exchange. There, ‘operation’, later mostly women, put plugs into sockets to
connect callers to their desired destinations.
The first exchange began operating in 1877. ‘Dial phones’
instructing automatic exchanges were still 40 years away. The appeal of the
telephone over the telegraph was it immediacy, convenience and privacy. You
heard the voice of the person you are talking to, rather than just reading
their words. Messages could be sent from your own home, rather than needing a
trip to the telegraph office. Once the call was established between the two
parties, not one else need interfere.
Bell’s telephone caused a sensation at the 1876 Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia; the Emperor of Brazil reputedly put a receiver to
his ear and dropped it with a start, crying it talks’ the phone was not, by
today’s standards, an overnight commercial success. In 1895, 20 years after its
invention, less than 300000 were in the USA, about one in 50 of the population.
Long distance calls, possible through “electronics’ made the telephone more
popular; numbers trebled in the next 20 years. By the 1950s, just about every
home in an industrialized nation had one, though a threat to the dominance of
the landline would emerge a few decades later from the cell phone’
Despite losing the patent battle over the telephone, Elisha Gray
did not fade into obscurity. He became a well regarded university professor,
and held 70 patents. His company, ‘Western Electric Manufacturing’ became today’s
Lucent Technologies. A deeply religious man, he wrote extensively on the nexus
between science and faith, and advocated the concept of ‘intelligent design’,
much discussed today. He died in 1901.
Aged only 30, Bell was rich and famous, married to the daughter
of his financial backer, a Boston Lawyer keen to break the Western Union
monopoly. With his Bell Telephone Companies rolling out wires on poles throughout
cities and towns to link his telephones, Bell continued to innovate. His mind
remained active until his death at 75. Among his many creations, he thought
most highly of his ‘photo phone’, which sent sounds on modulated beam of light,
anticipating today’s optic fibers. The death of his newborn son from
respiratory problems led him to construct a metal jacket to aid breathing. This
presaged the ‘iron lung’ used by polio victims many decades later. He was also
an early and passionate pioneer of powered flight.
