Privateline.com's Telephone History Page 3 --1870 to 1876
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(Soundwaves) (Life at Western Electric)
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III. The Inventors: Gray and Bell
Elisha Gray was a hard working
professional inventor with some success to his credit. Born in
1835 in Barnesville, Ohio, Gray was well educated for his time,
having worked his way through three years at Oberlin College.
His first telegraph related patent came in 1868. An expert electrician,
he co-founded Gray and Barton, makers of telegraph equipment.
The Western Union Telegraph Company, then funded by the Vanderbilts
and J.P. Morgan, bought a one-third interest in Gray and Barton
in 1872. They then changed its name to the Western Electric Manufacturing
Company, with Gray remaining an important person in the company.
To Gray, transmitting speech was an interesting goal but not
one of a lifetime.
Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, saw telephony as
the driving force in his early life. He became consumed with
inventing the telephone. Born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland,
Graham was raised in a family involved with music and the spoken
word. His mother painted and played music. His father originated
a system called visible speech that helped the deaf to speak.
His grandfather was a lecturer and speech teacher. Bell's college
courses included lectures on anatomy and physiology. His entire
education and upbringing revolved around the mechanics of speech
and sound. Many years after inventing the telephone Bell remarked,
"I now realize that I should never have invented the telephone
if I had been an electrician. What electrician would have been
so foolish as to try any such thing? The advantage I had was
that sound had been the study of my life -- the study of vibrations."
In 1870 Bell's father moved his family to Canada after losing
two sons to tuberculosis. He hoped the Canadian climate would
be healthier. In 1873 Bell became a vocal physiology professor
at Boston College. He taught the deaf the visual speech system
during the day and at night he worked on what he called a harmonic
or musical telegraph. Sending several messages at once over a
single wire would let a telegraph company increase their sending
capacity without having to install more poles and lines. An inventor
who made such a device would realize a great economy for the
telegraph company and a fortune for his or her self. Familiar
with acoustics, Bell thought he could send several telegraph
messages at once by varying their musical pitch. Sound odd? I'll
give you a crude example, a piano analogy, since Watson said
Bell played the piano well.
Imagine playing Morse code on the piano, striking dots and
dashes in middle C. Then imagine the instrument wired to a distant
piano. Striking middle C in one piano might cause middle C to
sound in the other. Now, by playing Morse code on the A or C
keys at the same time you might get the distant piano to duplicate
your playing, sending two messages at once. Perhaps. Bell didn't
experiment with pianos, of course, but with differently pitched
magnetic springs. And instead of just sending two messages at
once, Bell hoped to send thirty or forty. The harmonic telegraph
proved simple to think about, yet maddeningly difficult to build.
He labored over this device throughout the year and well into
the spring of 1874.
Then, at a friend's suggestion,
he worked that summer on a teaching aid for the deaf, a gruesome
device called the phonoautograph, made out of a dead man's ear.
Speaking into the device caused the ear's membrane to vibrate
and in turn move a lever. The lever then wrote a wavelike pattern
of the speech on smoked glass. Ugh. Many say Bell was fascinated
by how the tiny membrane caused the much heavier lever to work.
It might be possible, he speculated, to make a membrane work
in telephony, by using it to vary an electric current in intensity
with the spoken word. Such a current could then replicate speech
with another membrane. Bell had discovered the principle of the
telephone, the theory of variable resistance, as depicted below. [Brooks]
But learning to apply that principle correctly would take him
another two years.
Bell continued harmonic telegraph work through the fall of
1874. He wasn't making much progress but his tinkering gathered
attention. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a prominent Boston lawyer
and the president of the Clarke School for The Deaf, became interested
in Bell's experiments. He and George Sanders, a prosperous Salem
businessman, both sensed Bell might make the harmonic telegraph
work. They also knew Bell the man, since Bell tutored Hubbard's
daughter and he was helping Sander's deaf five year old son learn
to speak.
In October, 1874, Green went to Washington D.C. to conduct
a patent search. Finding no invention similar to Bell's proposed
harmonic telegraph, Hubbard and Sanders began funding Bell. All
three later signed a formal agreement in February, 1875, giving
Bell financial backing in return for equal shares from any patents
Bell developed. The trio got along but they would have their
problems. Sanders would court bankruptcy by investing over $100,000
before any return came to him. Hubbard, on the other hand, discouraged
Bell's romance with his daughter until the harmonic telegraph
was invented. Bell, in turn, would risk his funding by working
so hard on the telephone and by getting engaged to Mabel without
Hubbard's permission.
In the spring of 1875, Bell's experimenting picked up quickly
with the help of a talented young machinist named Thomas A. Watson.
Bell feverishly pursued the harmonic telegraph his backers wanted
and the telephone which was now his real interest. Seeking advice,
Bell went to Washington D.C. On March 1, 1875, Bell met with
Joseph Henry, the great scientist and inventor, then Secretary
of the Smithsonian Institution. It was Henry, remember, who pioneered
electromagnetism and helped Morse with the telegraph. Uninterested
in Bell's telegraph work, Henry did say Bell's ideas on transmitting
speech electrically represented "the germ of a great invention."
He urged Bell to drop all other work and get on with developing
the telephone. Bell said he feared he lacked the necessary electrical
knowledge, to which the old man replied, "Get it!"
[Grosvenor and Wesson] Bell quit
pursuing the harmonic telegraph, at least in spirit, and began
working full time on the telephone.
After lengthy experimenting in the spring of 1875, Bell told
Watson "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current
of electricity vary in its intensity as the air varies in density
when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound,
even the sound of speech." [Fagen]
He communicated the same idea in a
letter to Hubbard, who remained unimpressed and urged Bell to
work harder on the telegraph. But having at last articulated
the principle of variable resistance, Bell was getting much closer.
On June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson were testing the harmonic
telegraph when Bell heard a sound come through the receiver.
Instead of transmitting a pulse, which it had refused to do in
any case, the telegraph passed on the sound of Watson plucking
a tuned spring, one of many set at different pitches. How could
that be? Their telegraph, like all others, turned current on
and off. But in this instance, a contact screw was set too tightly,
allowing current to run continuously, the essential element needed
to transmit speech. Bell realized what happened and had Watson
build a telephone the next day based on this discovery. The Gallows
telephone, so called for its distinctive frame, substituted a
diaphragm for the spring. Yet it didn't work. A few odd sounds
were transmitted, yet nothing more. No speech. Disheartened,
tired, and running out of funds, Bell's experimenting slowed
through the remainder of 1875.
During the winter of 1875 and 1876 Bell continued experimenting
while writing a telephone patent application. Although he hadn't
developed a successful telephone, he felt he could describe how
it could be done. With his ideas and methods protected he could
then focus on making it work. Fortunately for Bell and many others,
the Patent Office in 1870 dropped its requirement that a working
model accompany a patent application. On February 14, 1876, Bell's
patent application was filed by his attorney. It came only hours
before Elisha Gray filed his Notice of Invention for a telephone.
Mystery still surrounds Bell's application and what happened
that day. In particular, the key point to Bell's application,
the principle of variable resistance, was scrawled in a margin,
almost as an afterthought. Some think Bell was told of Gray's
Notice then allowed to change his application. That was never
proved, despite some 600 lawsuits that would eventually challenge
the patent. Finally, on March 10, 1876, one week after his patent
was allowed, in Boston, Massachusetts, at his lab at 5 Exeter
Place, Bell succeeded in transmitting speech. He was not yet
30. Bell used a liquid transmitter, something he hadn't outlined
in his patent or even tried before, but something that was described
in Gray's Notice.
Bell's patent, U.S. Number
174,465, has been called the most valuable ever issued. If you
have QuickTime or another way to view .tif files you can view
the document at the United
States Patent and Trademark site (external link). Search
for it by the number. Each page of the six page document is about
230K. And yes, it is very hard to follow. Patents are meant to
protect ideas, not necessarily to explain them . . .
The Watson-built telephone looked
odd and acted strangely. Bellowing into the funnel caused a small
disk or diaphragm at the bottom to move. This disk was, in turn,
attached to a wire floating in an acid-filled metal cup. A wire
attached to the cup in turn led to a distant receiver. As the
wire moved up and down it changed the resistance within the liquid.
This now varying current was then sent to the receiver, causing
its membrane to vibrate and thereby produce sound. This telephone
wasn't quite practical; it got speech across, but badly. Bell
soon improved it by using an electromagnetic transmitter, a metal
diaphragm and a permanent magnet. The telephone had been invented.
Now it was time for it to evolve. Next page -- >
For
the definitive answer on who invented the telephone (A hint,
it was Bell), and a link to Edwin S. Grosvenor's authoritative,
well researched, and clear thinking site defending Bell, click
here. (internal link)
How the first telephone worked
