Tring, Tring

Alexander Graham Bell. All I knew of him was that he was the guy who invented the telephone. Which is why pretty much everything I read about him in Edwin S. Grosvenor’s book was new to me. And fascinating.

As a boy, Bell’s father introduced him to Sir Charles Wheatstone who had built a machine that could pronounce human words. It “made a great impression upon my mind”, wrote Bell later, “although the articulation was disappointingly crude”. Bell and his brother tried to make a similar machine themselves. It was a good learning experience to “learn how the sounds of a voice are reproduced”. They also learned persistence. These were Bell’s first steps to the telephone…

His father meanwhile catalogued every sound the mouth could make and invented a system of symbols that indicated the “position and action of the tongue and lips as they made sounds”. He called it Visible Sound. This system was deemed useful to teach the deaf. When Bell went to teach at the Clark School for the Deaf, he used the system. Next, he devised instruments with stretched membranes to “measure the vibrations created by human speech”. All of this would help him later in life to build the first membrane telephone, the “ancestor of all the telephones of today”, recalled Bell.

Bell played around with ways to send sounds via telegraph. But he wanted more: to not just send a few sounds, but entire human voices. By 1873, Bell was beginning to feel that a “marriage of acoustic theory and electricity” would make a telephone possible. When he finally got the patents for the telephone in 1876, he had control over a world changing invention. But operationalizing the idea was a different problem altogether.

Recognizing all this, Western Union, the monopolistic telegraph operator in the US, offered to operationalize the telephone. But the terms they offered left Bell with little. They could afford to be that way because:

-          Western Union had the telegraph cables already laid out;

-          Investment in (new telephone) cables would take a lot of money;

-          Who could Bell turn to anyway for alternatives anyway?

So Bell refused their terms and founded a new company. It would prove to be a very hard, long drawn battle involving multiple patent fights, money problems, very limited coverage initially and technical challenges (distance a signal could be carried, cross-talk, distortion, theft of copper wires etc). When electricity lines were laid later, they would cause interference with the telephone lines.

But Bell would win the war to commercialize the phone, eventually becoming so big that his company would be accused of monopolistic behavior itself! His company had evolved over the years to become a goliath known as… AT&T.