Thomas Edison patented a more efficient transmitter, making longer distance calls a realistic prospect. Among those were Thomas Edison and Professor David Hughes, who both produced improvements to Bell’s early instrument, transforming the telephone into a truly successful communication device. In many respects, Bell’s telephone was flawed, his receiver and transmitter designs being considerably improved by others within a couple of years. France and Germany cite their own contenders for the title. Meucci was pursuing his claim in the Supreme Court when he died in 1889. Bell and the Italian had shared a workshop in the 1870s. In 2002, the US Congress formally recognised Italian Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone, based on prototypes he demonstrated in 1860. Sometimes described as the most valuable patent ever filed, for years following the award, Alexander Graham Bell had to defend his patent in expensive and protracted litigation battles brought by a whole range of inventors. Two days later, Bell described what happened in his laboratory notebook: In Bell’s bedroom, Watson waited with a reed receiver pressed against his ear. Bell was in his laboratory with this latest experimental version of a telephone transmitter. Just three days later, on 10 March 1876, his first intelligible telephone communication was made. Bell was granted the patent on 7 March 1876. On that very same day a few hours later – or was it actually a few hours earlier? – inventor Elisha Gray filed his own idea for a telephone device at the same office. Sensing the danger of rival developments for this valuable invention, Bell’s future father-in-law filed an application for ‘Improvements in Telegraphy’ on 14 February 1876. To speed matters along, he also funded an assistant, Thomas Watson. Her father, being aware of Bell’s experiments with possible ‘speaking telegraph’ devices, refused his permission for the couple to marry until Bell had successfully developed his new invention. He was supported financially in this work by Gardiner Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer and politician, whose deaf daughter, Mabel, had been taught to lip-read and speak by Bell. Through study and experimentation, Bell hypothesised that if sound waves could be converted into a fluctuating electric current, that current could then be reconverted into sound waves identical to the original at the other end of the circuit. He aimed to make electro-mechanical devices capable of transmitting and receiving different tones for each message. He was working on the holy grail of the day: sending multiple telegraph messages over the same wire. The patent for the telephoneĪlexander Graham Bell did not think he was inventing a ‘telephone’ during his early experiments. You can see the model in the Communicate gallery at the National Museum of Scotland. This type of dismantleable model was used to teach anatomy students the complexities of human vocal physiognomy. These early experiments in speech creation, along with his knowledge of anatomy, informed his own experiments on transmitting speech, which he began in earnest from 1873.Ībove: Teaching model of the human tongue, larynx and vocal chords, made of papier mâché by Dr Louis Thomas Jérome Auzoux in France, c.1860. Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University. Building on his father’s earlier work on the human voice, Bell started teaching deaf students in Boston, moving to the United States in 1871. He attended classes in anatomy and physiology in London for a couple of years, building his understanding of how speech and hearing worked.įollowing the death of both of Bell’s brothers from tuberculosis, in 1870 the family emigrated to a healthier life in Canada. Encouraged by his father, young Bell attempted to make working models of ear and vocal cords, aiming to create a mechanical speech device. He aimed to use this visualisation as a means of teaching deaf people to speak, without them ever having heard words spoken. His father’s work focused on developing a system of ‘visible speech’, which allowed speech sounds to be written down.
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