Alexander Graham Bell.,Alexander Graham Bell: A Life of Innovation and Controversy,Biography of Alexander Graham Bell., history of Alexander Graham Bell.

                               

                                                 Alexander Graham Bell.

 Inexorably, he is linked with the telephone,although we will see that he worked on everything from wireless technology and sound recordersto planes, boats, and even a metal detector. His career was not without controversy, though. He had to face almost six hundred lawsuitsin his lifetime. Was he truly the inventor of the telephoneor just someone who stole ideas and had better lawyers? Was he a champion of deaf people or did hisefforts do more harm than good? Neither question can honestly be answeredwith certainty so those might be decisions that you'll have to make for yourself afteryou have finished watching this video.
                                             
                                                                 Early Life 

Alexander Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Alexander MelvilleBell and Eliza Grace Symonds. He had two older brothers, Melville and Edward,who both died of tuberculosis when Bell was a young adult. Originally, he was simply named Alexander,but the young Bell wanted a middle name like his two older brothers. His father relented and, on his 11th birthday,gifted him the middle name Graham after Alexander Graham, one of his father's former studentsand family friend. Image suggestion: Bell familyhttps://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Melville-family-standing-right/dp/B004J7KDF2 https://gardenofpraise.com/agbell14.htmFrom a young age, Alexander Graham Bell showed an interest in studying speech and phonetics. This was not very surprising seeing as hisfather and grandfather were both phoneticians. His father was a professor who wrote severalseminal works on the subject and developed a phonetic alphabet called Visible Speech. There was also a personal motivation for Bellas his mother (and, later, his wife) were both deaf. Allegedly, Bell's first invention came atthe tender age of 12.

 He was playing with a friend whose familyowned a flour mill and noticed how long it took to husk the grain. He then built a machine which used rotatingpaddles and nail brushes to speed along the laborious process. Image suggestion: Mechanical Turk reconstructionhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Kempelen_chess1.jpg Another notable episode in the developmentof young Bell's scientific interest was when his father took him and his brothers to seea talking automaton based on the Mechanical Turk which had been lost in a fire. The Turk, built a hundred years prior by Hungarianinventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, was a sensation in its day. Purportedly, it was a mechanical device thatcould play chess on its own against human opponents.

Notable statesmen such as Ben Franklin andNapoleon, both keen chess players, were bested by the machine. Although the Turk was an amazing creationcapable of impressive movements, one thing it could not do was play chess. In that regard, the Turk was a hoax for insidethe machine was room for a human chess master who actually controlled the automaton's moves. Moving to Canada and Continued ResearchImage suggestion: Bell Homestead The death of Bell's brothers came in shortorder, just three years apart. After Bell himself and his father also sufferedhealth scares, the family decided to leave the big city and move to a quiet place inCanada because it had a healthier climate. They settled on Brantford, Ontario, wherethe Bell Homestead still stands as a national historic site and museum. Bell set up a workshop to continue his studiesinto speech and sound, but also began traveling to Massachusetts and Connecticut to teachhis father's Visible Speech System to schools for the deaf.

 He worked as a teacher for the next few years,first as Boston University and then at his own private practice. During this time, he met 15-year-old pupilMabel Hubbard and fell in love with her. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, was awealthy, influential man in Massachusetts who funded some of Bell's research. He and his partner, Thomas Sanders (who alsohad a deaf child tutored by Bell), wanted to secure patents related to telegraph technologyso they financed Bell's work perfecting the harmonic telegraph. Such a system allowed multiple messages tobe transmitted simultaneously over a single telegraph wire, but it was this research thatled to Bell inventing the telephone. First WordsOn March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words into a telephone. They were "Mr. Watson, come here – I wantto see you".

 His assistant walked into his office and thetwo swapped places, with Bell now listening to Watson read a few passages from a book. Bell noted that he could definitely hear loud,articulate sounds, but that they were "indistinct and muffled". Watson's journal added a bit of contentionto the proceedings. First off, he noted the famous sentence tobe "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you", not "I want to see you". He also claimed that these words were notmerely a test of the telephone, but rather a cry for help as when he entered Bell's office,he discovered that the inventor had accidentally spilled battery acid on his clothes.

This story was later debunked by Watson'sown great-granddaughter as a fabulation of her forefather he made up decades after thefact. Three days prior, Bell was awarded patentNo. 174,465 for "improvement in telegraphy", which would become one of the most valuable(and most controversial) patents in American history. Gardiner Greene Hubbard set up Bell Telephoneas a joint stock company to look after their interests and split 5,000 shares of the companybetween four people: him, Bell, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Sanders. Image suggestion: Bell familyhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Graham_Bell_and_family.jpg On a personal level, Alexander Graham Bellwas soon-to-be a rich man as he owned around 1,500 shares of the company.

 Finally, Gardiner Hubbard consented to himmarrying his daughter Mabel, the deaf pupil that Bell taught and fell in love with a fewyears back. On July 11, 1877, just a few days after theBell Telephone Company was founded, Mabel and Alexander (or Alec, as she called him)tied the knot. To show his love and trust, Bell gifted Mabelall but ten shares in his company as a wedding present. Who Invented the Telephone? Now we arrive at the most contentious andcontroversial aspect of Bell's legacy. Did he really invent the telephone or didhe steal his idea and make a fortune off others? The answer is a resounding "We're not sure". The topic has been fiercely debated for almost150 years and has been the subject of books and hundreds of lawsuits. Everybody has an opinion on it, but it isfar from a settled matter. When it comes to complicated inventions likethe telephone, they are often the result of the work of multiple people.

Oftentimes, credit ends up going to the personwho makes the most practical or best working version rather than the ones who originateit. History also tends to have a short attentionspan and attributes the work of many to one for the sake of brevity. It is certainly not fair, but it is what tendsto happen. Antonio MeucciImage suggestion: Antonio Meucci Apart from Bell, there were other inventorswho had substantial claims to the telephone. Italian Antonio Meucci built a device describedas an "electromagnetic telephone" decades before Bell. He kept on improving it, but never found themoney needed to finance his invention. In 1871, he didn't even have the funding necessaryto take out a patent for his "teletrofono", as he dubbed it. Instead, he filed a caveat – an officialnotice that a patent will be filed at a later date.

It was much cheaper, but also needed to berenewed annually, something which he stopped doing in 1874. He tried to obtain funding from Western Union,but not only did they turn him down, they later claimed to have lost the proprietarymaterials he sent them. Meucci and Bell went to court and, at first,things seemed to go in the Italian inventor's favor. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the caseand fraud charges were filed against Bell. However, Meucci died in 1889 and his casedied with him. Italy, of course, always considered AntonioMeucci to be the rightful inventor of the telephone, but in 2002 so did the United StatesHouse of Representatives. They passed a resolution which honored Meucci'swork and specified that if he had continued to pay the fee for his caveat, no patent couldhave been issued to Bell.

A few days later, to show support for "theirguy", the Canadian Parliament passed a motion, reaffirming Alexander Graham Bell as the inventorof the telephone. Elisha GrayImage suggestion: Elisha Gray The story of Elisha Gray is much better knownto the public. It was a race to the patent office betweenhim and Bell as they created their versions of the telephone around the same time. The Scottish inventor beat Gray by a few hoursand, therefore, secured his spot in the history books while Elisha Gray became a footnote. Gray, like Bell, was working on the harmonictelegraph with funding from Western Union. He developed a device that could transmitmusical tones using vibrating reeds in 1874, but didn't follow through on it immediately.

Over a year later, he finally drew a diagramof his device and had his lawyer file a caveat with the patent office on February 14, 1876. Of course, by then it was too late, as Bell'slawyer had already submitted his patent to the office. Image suggestion: Liquid transmitterhttps://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1313943 A legal battle ensued. There were even accusations that Bell stoleideas from Gray, particularly his design for a liquid transmitter. The most egregious claim came courtesy ofpatent examiner Zenas Fisk Wilber who confessed that he was bribed to show Gray's caveat toBell and his lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, which he did because he was heavily in debt to Bailey.

Bell, obviously, denied all charges of wrongdoingand the fact that Wilber was an alcoholic and had given conflicting affidavits sunkhis credibility. In the end, the courts sided with Bell andsubsequently upheld his patent in hundreds of other lawsuits. Success of the Telephone Another challenger to Bell and his telephonewas Western Union which, at the time, was the largest communications company in theworld. In what is widely regarded as one of the worstbusiness decisions of all time, Western Union turned down the opportunity to buy the patentfor the telephone for only $100,000 when the technology was in its infancy. Company president William Orton balked atthe idea, seeing the new device as just a "toy". He considered the telephone impractical andbelieved that no one would prefer it over the telegraph.

 He was wrong, as you might imagine. The telephone took off almost immediatelyand, just two years later, his company valued the patent at $25 million. Western Union tried to get into the game andtasked Thomas Edison to build an improved device that they could patent. The two companies went to court and WesternUnion lost…badly. In the end, it surrendered all telephone-relatedpatents and agreed to pull out of the business entirely in exchange for a few minor concessions. It was at this time that Thomas Edison providedhis own contribution to the telephone, one which is still around today long after thepatents expired and the technology became obsolete. He popularized the greeting "Hello".

The word existed before then, but it was typicallyused as an exclamation as in "Hello, what's going on here?" If it were up to Alexander Graham Bell, eventoday we would be answering our phones by going "Ahoy". The Volta BureauIn 1880, Bell used his money to establish the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.,and continue research into sound technologies. In 1887, he also founded and funded the VoltaBureau whose goal was to help deaf people. It later merged with a different deaf-relatedorganization of which Bell was also president and today it is known as the Alexander GrahamBell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing or, simply, the AG Bell. The original building is still around, servingas headquarters for the institution, and is listed as a national historic landmark. Image suggestion: Volta BureauGiven how much Bell revolutionized oral communication, it is a shame we have no idea what he actuallysounded like. Well, not so fast. It was thought that no recordings of him survived,but that changed in 2013.

The Smithsonian Institution found an old wax-and-cardboardrecord from Volta Laboratory and researchers were able to recover the audio. It is over four-and-a-half minutes of Bellreading various numbers and dollar figures. Fittingly, it ends with the words "hear myvoice…Alexander Graham Bell". Helper or Hinderer? With all the work he did with deaf people,you would think that Bell would be regarded as a hero in this community, but, actually,he is quite a controversial figure. He held some strong views about how the conditionshould be approached which involved keeping deaf people apart from one another and completelyeliminating sign language. Bell considered the only proper way to teachdeaf people was through oralism – communication through the use of speech and lip reading. He regarded sign language as a foreign language,one which had no place in the United States. He tried to have it removed from schools.

 Moreover, he wrote a paper called “Uponthe Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race” which warned of an upcoming "calamity"involving the creation of a "deaf race". He believed that deaf people should not socializewith each other because socialization leads to marriage which leads to children who willalso be deaf. This all fell in line with his advocacy ofeugenics. He believed the practice could be used toimprove human breeding, although he never went as far as others to suggest that thegovernment should impose any kind of controls on reproduction. Instead, he wanted the elements that promoteddeaf intermarriages to be identified and eliminated. Just like the telephone, Bell's work withthe deaf left behind a tainted, vexatious legacy. The President Is ShotOn July 2, 1881, United States President James Garfield was getting ready to leave Washington,D.C., for his summer vacation.

 At the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station,he was approached by a disgruntled supporter and office seeker who shot at him with a BullDog revolver from point-blank range. While one bullet only grazed Garfield, theother hit him in the back and got lodged inside his body. The president died 80 days later after hisdoctors proved unable to locate and extract the bullet, despite some assistance from AlexanderGraham Bell. Charles GuiteauThe murderer was Charles J. Guiteau, a man who concomitantly thought he was doing theRepublican Party a favor by getting rid of Garfield and who also believed that he wasbeing commanded by God. Modern medical professionals have diagnosedGuiteau of likely being a narcissistic schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, but even in hisown time talk of his mental health was a hot topic among alienists.

 They were very keen to examine his brain whichis still on display in the main hall of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Image suggestion: Guiteau's brain, MutterMuseum Neurologist Edward Charles Spitzka testifiedat Guiteau's trial and said that he suffered from "moral insanity", something we wouldlikely call sociopathy today. Coincidentally, the doctor's son, Edward AnthonySpitzka, followed in his father's footsteps and, 20 years later, would perform the autopsyof the next presidential assassin, Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley in 1901. During his life, Guiteau jumped on many bandwagons. His latest was a Republican faction calledthe Stalwarts. During the 1880 election, he wrote a ramblingspeech in support of Garfield which he was allowed to deliver once in front of a smallcrowd in New York City.

It was less than nothing but, in Guiteau'smind, his speech was crucial to helping Garfield win the election. Afterwards, Guiteau started roaming the hallsof the White House and State Department, badgering anyone who would listen about his "deserved"reward. He wanted a diplomatic post to Paris or, maybe,Vienna. Image suggestion: Guiteau cartoonhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Guiteau_cartoon2.jpg Of course, nobody took him seriously and,eventually, Secretary of State James Blaine told him, in no uncertain terms, to go awayand never bother him again. This launched Guiteau on his downward spiralof madness. In his mind, he needed to get rid of Blainewhich, obviously, could only have been achieved by killing the president. His delusion was so great that, during histrial, Guiteau believed he would be acquitted because the American people would rise upand demand his release. When this didn't happen and he was convicted,he was still certain that new United States President Chester A. Arthur would pardon him.

 A Medical ConundrumGoing back to Garfield, his injuries and treatment are still discussed in medical circles today,almost 140 years later. Specifically, people talk about how the presidentwas as much a victim of medical incompetence as he was of an assassination attempt. Perhaps one of the sanest things that Guiteausaid during his trial was that "the doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him". As it was later revealed, the mystery bulletlodged itself in the president's soft tissue. Nowadays, finding it would be trivial andthe patient would be on the mend and out of the hospital in just a few days. However, even in his time, Garfield wouldhave had a decent shot at survival with a more adroit medical staff. A lot of the blame rests on the man who self-appointedhimself as White House physician.

 He was Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss (and yes,his first name really was Doctor). By that time, British surgeon Joseph Listerwas already telling physicians to wash their hands and sterilize equipment to prevent infections,but the idea had not been accepted across the pond yet. Therefore, Bliss and over a dozen other doctorsroutinely stuck their unclean fingers inside Garfield's wound, trying to locate the bullet. This led to infections and, eventually, sepsis. Moreover, the president lost almost 80 poundsduring his hospitalization due to a diet prescribed by Bliss which was very non-nutritious andheavy on morphine. Bell Offers HelpWhen Bell heard that the president was shot and doctors couldn't find the bullet, he wentto work on a device that could detect hidden metal. He called it an "induction balance" deviceand it was actually based on an earlier invention by French electrical engineer Gustave Trouvé.

 Bell tested it on Civil War veterans who hadbullets still lodged in their bodies and found that his device was only sometimes successful. Image suggestion: Drawing of Bell using thedevice on Garfield https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-alexander-graham-bell-using-his-induction-balance-device-to-locate-50056615.htmlBell's invention had a large battery with a condenser, a wooden controller which waspassed over the patient's body, and a telephone receiver which he kept to his ear to listenfor the sound of metal. Bell first tried to use his "induction balance"machine on Garfield in late July. He assembled the device on-site, but all heheard coming out of the receiver was a strange sputtering noise. He failed to locate the bullet, but laterconcluded that, in his haste, he made mistakes while constructing the device. Bell returned on August 1 and tried his testagain, but still failed to pinpoint the location of the bullet. He went back to the drawing board, but nevergot a chance to try the metal detector again. President Garfield died on September 19 ofsepsis and emaciation. Now, there is still plenty of discussion regardingthe reason why Bell's device failed.

The most common story in circulation putsthe blame on interference from the president's mattress which was made using steel wires. However, in a report, Bell expressed his beliefthat the bullet was too deep inside the body to be picked up by his metal detector. Dr. Doctor has also been accused of only allowingBell to check the president's right side because he was convinced that was where the bulletwas located. An autopsy later proved him wrong. Continued InnovationThe telephone brought Bell fame and fortune and working with the deaf was his true passion,but he was a scientist of many interests who had dozens of patents in other areas. Alongside Charles Sumner Tainter, he createdan improved version of the phonograph dubbed the "Graphophone". They set up a new business for this inventioncalled the Volta Graphophone Company. It later merged with another company whichevolved into what is known today as Columbia Records. Image suggestion: PhotophoneEven more impressive, the two created a primitive version of a wireless telephone Bell calleda "photophone". He used it to transmit an audio message toTainter over 650 feet away.

 In an interview, Bell called this his "greatestachievement", although it wouldn't be until the arrival of fiber optics that such technologywould become truly useful. Bell also served as second president of theNational Geographic Society and helped turn it into one of the largest non-profit scientificorganizations in the world. He was not, as is sometimes stated, amongthe original 33 founders, although his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, was. Perhaps most surprising (and most obscure)of all was his work in aeronautics. He founded the Aerial Experiment Associationwith like-minded individuals such as aviators Glenn Curtiss and Thomas Selfridge. Together, they designed and built the SilverDart which, in 1909, made the first powered flight in Canada. Image suggestion: Silver DartFrom planes, Bell moved on to boats. With engineer Casey Baldwin, he built a hydrofoilboat dubbed the HD-4. On September 9, 1919, it set the new boatspeed record at 61.58 knots. This and the Silver Dart flight both occurredat the Bras d'Or Lake in Nova Scotia, near Bell's estate of Beinn Bhreagh where he spentthe last three decades of his life. As you can see, Bell's career was full ofinnovation long after the telephone came into being. The HD-4 turned out to be his last taste ofgreatness as Bell died a few years later, in 1922. He left behind a legacy that is sure to stirup mixed emotions and elicit differing reactions from people.