Alexander Graham Bell - The Life and Death of the Inventor of the Telephone

Welcome to the 5 Minute Biographies YouTube channel. Here is your host, Wayne Armstrong. Hi guys, welcome to 5 Minute Biographies. Before we get started I'd just like to remind you to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss out on any of the episodes we've got coming along in the future. And also to mention that you can read a transcript of the show on the website at 5minutebiographies.com and you can listen to the show on the podcast at 5minutebiographies.com forward slash pod. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And if you enjoy the show and would like to say thanks by say, buying me a coffee, please head on over to 5minutebiographies.com forward slash coffee to see how. Right, with that all being said, let's get on with the show and episode 55, Alexander Graham Bell. Alexander Graham Bell was born in the family home on South Charlotte Street in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 3rd March 1847. He was the middle one of three brothers. His older brother Melville was born in 1845 and his younger brother Edward in 1867. At the time of his birth Alexander did not have a middle name but he pleaded with his father to give him one. On his 11th birthday his father, who was also called Alexander, said okay and the name Graham was chosen as a way of honouring a family friend. After being educated initially by his father, Alexander attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh. Although he was not an outstanding student, he was often absent from classes and only managed to achieve average grades. When he left school at the age of 15 he travelled to London to live with his grandfather, who was also called Alexander, and with whom he spent a lot of time discussing a whole host of different matters, and it is thought that it is with his grandfather's guidance that Alexander started to take study seriously. He also taught him to speak correctly, clearly and with conviction. When he turned sixteen, Bell took up a pupil teacher position at Western House Academy, where he studied Latin and Greek, and in return he took classes in elocution and music, for which he was also paid £10 per session. The following year Alexander joined his brother Melville at the University of Edinburgh, before being accepted for a place at the University College London. Encouraged by their father, Alexander and Melville became fascinated with the sound of human speech, together to produce their version of an automaton head that could speak a few words and which could be changed slightly by changing the shape of the lips. Intrigued by what they had accomplished, Alexander took the experiment one stage further using the family dog, which he taught to growl, whilst Alexander changed the shape of its lips, also manipulating its vocal cords, so much so that he could make the dog appear to speak. Similar work had already been conducted in Germany, but by studying the resulting book written by Hermann von Helmholtz, Alexander deduced that he should be able to simulate human speech using electricity. However, the family would be plunged into crisis, when over the course of a few short years between 1867 and 1870, both of Alexander's brothers died due to complications associated with tuberculosis. Alexander had also been ill, but fortunately had started to recover, resulting in the family deciding that they should move to Canada to give Alexander the best possible chance of a full recovery. So when he was twenty-three years old, in 1870, Alexander travelled with his family to Paris, Ontario, where they stayed with a Baptist minister and friend of the family, Thomas Henderson, before purchasing a ten-and-a-half acre farm near the town of Brantford. The improved climate allowed Bell to recover much more rapidly, and the space on the farm also allowed him to set up a workshop in an old converted carriage house he called his dreaming place, and where he continued his experiments based on the work of Helmholtz. In Canada, Bell had perfected methods taught by his father to read symbols that represented the sound a word makes, which he and his father called visible speech. Whilst helping his father demonstrate this, he came to the attention of Susanna E. Hall's private school for the deaf in South Kensington, London, where two deaf-mute girls made remarkable progress under his tutelage. After the move to Canada, he continued working with the deaf, and was invited by Sarah Fuller, the principal of the Boston School of Deaf-Mutes, now called the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, to introduce the idea of visible speech. The programme was so successful that it led to him also teaching the method in Hertford, Connecticut and Northampton, Massachusetts. He had not given up on his idea of simulating human speech using electricity though, and by 1874 Alexander Graham Bell's work had led to the harmonic telegraph, which was a way of transmitting musical notes and human speech over distance using electricity. He knew that the work could lead to something revolutionary, so to concentrate on his experiments he gave up most of his lucrative work with patients. He retained only two pupils, a six-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl called Mabel, so keen for her to work with Bell that he became Bell's friend and benefactor. As Alexander and Mabel got to know each other, their relationship blossomed, and although there was a ten-year age gap between the pair, they fell in love and were married on the 11th of July 1877. They went on to have four children together, two girls, Elsie and Marion, and two boys who unfortunately died in infancy. The use of the telegraph system, which had been developed in the 1830s, had increased massively over the years, and there was a clear need to try and figure a way of transmitting multiple messages over a single wire to the need to erect new lines, and so Bell began researching methods of doing so. Competition was fierce. Western Union hired Thomas Edison, who came up with the quadruplex which could send four messages over a wire simultaneously, and other inventors looked for ways of increasing this number, including Bell and his rival Elisha Gray, both of whom developed ways of dividing a line into ten channels and more. Once the method was established it wasn't a massive leap to the idea of transmitting the human voice over these channels, and Bell filed a patent describing how this could be done on the 14th of February 1876, beating Elisha Gray to the punch by only a few hours. Bell produced the first intelligible speech sent over a wire on the 10th of March 1876, when he sent a message to his lab assistant, Thomas A. Watson. The words transcribed in Bell's notes were, Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you. After more work refining the equipment, Bell demonstrated his invention, the telephone, to judges at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, and by July 1877 the Bell Telephone Company had been founded, with the aim of commercialising the telephone. By the early 1880s Alexander Graham Bell was an independently wealthy man, but he quickly lost interest in telephony and sold most of his shares. Some of the money he had accumulated, including that which was awarded as prize money by the French government when he was awarded the Volta Prize for achievement in electrical science, was used by Bell to set up Volta Laboratory, which was devoted to studies on deafness. Bell also took an interest in improving Thomas Edison's phonograph invention. His improvements led to a device called the graphophone, which used removable cardboard cylinders, coated in wax, to record and play back sound, and which received payment in 1886. The same year the Bell family moved to a 50-acre plot of land on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, and in 1888 Bell co-founded the National Geographic Society. By the 1890s he had completely shifted his focus, concentrating on heavier-than-air flight, experimenting with different wing and propeller blade shapes. His work, which continued even after the Wright brothers succeeded with their attempts at heavier-than-air flight, contributed significantly to the career of aviation pioneer Glenn A. Curtis. Alexander Graham Bell died on 2nd August 1922 at his Cape Breton home at the age of 75 due to complications arising from diabetes. He was buried at the top of Bane Brear Mountain on the estate overlooking Bradore Lake.