Alexander Graham Bell    Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847, the second of three sons of Alexander Melville and Eliza Grace (Symonds) Bell.  Both his father and grandfather were well-known professors of elocution.  He was educated in the common schools of Edinburgh and at University College, London, meanwhile receiving private instruction in music, elocution, and the teaching of the deaf.  In 1870 he was threatened with tuberculosis, and, as his two brothers had already died of that disease, his father immediately moved his family to Canada, settling at Tutelo Heights, near Brantford, Ont., where his son soon recovered his health.By this time Bell was an expert teacher of the deaf, specializing in the Visible Speech Method invented by his father.  In 1871 he gave courses in this method at the Boston School for the Deaf, later the Horace Mann School, at the Clarke School, Northampton, Mass., and at the American Asylum, Hartford, Conn.  In 1872 he opened a school of his own in Boston and in 1873 was appointed professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.  Meanwhile he had acquired several private pupils, one of them being the five-year-old son of Thomas Sanders of Haverhill, Mass., who had been born deaf.  Bell had charge of the child’s entire education for more than three hears, living with him at the home of his grandmother in Salem.Of an inventive turn of mind since boyhood, Bell, during this period, was conducting experiments along three related lines–to devise a phon-autograph, a multiple telegraph, and an electric speaking telegraph or telephone.  These experiments resulted in two patents.  The first was No. 161,739 issued on April 6, 1875, for an Improvement in Transmitters and Receivers for Electrical Telegraphs; the other was No. 178,399, issued on June 6, 1876, for Telephonic Telegraph Receivers.  Meanwhile his teaching of the Sanders boy had been so successful that Thomas Sanders, in gratitude, had offered to meet all the expenses of his experiments and patents.  A little later Gardiner Greene Hubbard also became interested in Bell and made similar offers of assistance.  The three men then joined forces.Both Sanders and Hubbard were primarily interested in the telegraph, but Bell, regarding the telephone as more important, persisted in h is experiments, and it was while he was at his father’s home in Brantford, Ont., on July 26, 1874, as he tells us, that he first formed clearly in his mind the theory of the telephone which ultimately proved to be correct.  On June 2, 1875, in the shop at 109 Court Street, Boston, Bell heard the overtones of the steel spring which his assistant, Thomas Watson had been plucking.  He knew at once that he had found what he had been seeking, that nay condition of apparatus which would reproduce the tone and overtones of a steel spring could be made to reproduce the tones and overtones of the human voice.  Bell gave Watson directions for making the first telephone.  When it was tested the next morning, Watson could recognize Bell’s voice and could almost understand some of the words.  On March 10, 1876, the telephone transmitted its first fully intelligible sentence: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.”On May 10, 1876, Bell announced his invention to the scientific world in ad address before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Meanwhile, in September and October, 1875, he had written the specifications for his patent application.  The historic first telephone patent, No. 174,465, was allowed on his 29th birthday, March 3, 1876, and issued on March 7, 1876.  This was followed by a second patent, No. 186,787, issued on January 30, 1877, providing for the substitution of an iron or steel diaphragm for the membrane and armature of the first patent.  Upon the issuance of these patents many claimants came forward to dispute Bell’s rights, but after the most prolonged and important litigation in the history of American patent law, including about 600 cases, the United States Supreme Court upheld all of Bell’s claims.

On June 25, 1876, Bell placed his telephones on exhibition at the International Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia.  In August, 1876, he conducted the first long-distance demonstration — a one-way transmission of speech and music over eight miles of telegraph wire from Brantford to Paris, Ont.  On October 9,. 1876, the first two-way long-distance transmission took place–a conversation between Bell and Watson over two miles of telegraph wire between Boston and Cambridgeport.  On February 12, 1877, the telephone was used for the first time to send a report to a newspaper–an account of Bell’s lecture at Salem, transmitted over telegraph wires to Boston.  With the spring of 1877, the commercial development of the invention came to the fore.  The first regular telephone organization was effected on July 8, 1877. in the form of a trusteeship called the Bell Telephone Co., with Gardiner Greene Hubbard as trustee and Thomas Sanders as treasurer.  By this arrangement Bell turned all his business affairs over to his partners, and on July 11, 1877, he married Mabel G. Hubbard, daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and left for Europe, where he remained for over a year.  His subsequent activity in the commercial development of his invention was slight.

In 1880 the French government awarded him the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs for the invention of the telephone, and later he was the recipient of honorary degrees from twelve universities on both sides of the Atlantic.  Among his later inventions were the photophone, the induction balance for the locating of metallic objects in the human body, and the telephone probe.  During the last 25 years of his life he was chiefly interested in aviation.  He invented the tetrahedral kite and in the ‘nineties gave encouragement and financial aid to Samuel P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in his study of aerodynamics.  In 1907 he founded the Aerial Experiment Association, which, in 1908, sponsored the first public flight of a heavier-than-air machine.  During the first world war he invented a motor boat which attained a speed of 71 miles an hour.  In 1883, in co-operation with Gardiner Greene Hubbard, he established Science, now the organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and from 1896 to 1904 was president of the National Geographic Society.  In 1891 he founded the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1898 onward was regularly appointed a Smithsonian regent.  In 1915 he opened the first trans-continental telephone line from New York to San Francisco.

He died at his summer home at Bras d’Or Lakes, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, On August 2, 1922, and was buried on top of a mountain, in a tomb cut in the rock, while every telephone on the continent of North America remained silent for two minutes.

reprinted from Connecticut Pioneers in Telephony 1950