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Sound and speech were part of Bell’s life from a young age.
Both his father and grandfather were well-known teachers of elocution and speech training; his father in Edinburgh, his grandfather in London.
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Following the death of both of Bell’s brothers from tuberculosis, in 1870 the family emigrated to start a healthier life in Canada.
Building on his father’s earlier work on the human voice, Bell moved to the United States in 1871 and started teaching deaf students in Boston.
Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.
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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.
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Two days later, Bell described what happened in his laboratory notebook:
“I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: ‘Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you.’
"To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said."
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On that same day a few hours later – or was it a few hours earlier? – inventor Elisha Gray of Highland Park, Illinois, filed his own idea for a telephone device at the same office.
Bell was granted the patent on 7 March 1876, just three days before his first successful transmission.
Tel. Phon. (1877-01-12)LIFE Photo Collection
Controversy remains as to whether Bell or his father-in-law might have had access to the details of Gray’s patent through a patent office clerk in Hubbard’s pay.
The clerk seemed to admit as much in a later court case, but Bell’s patent was upheld, as it was in the many cases which followed.
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Still widely known as the inventor of the telephone, by his early thirties Bell had given up his interest in this invention.
He spent the rest of his life with Mabel and their family in Canada, working on a series of varied projects including flight, sheep breeding, developing a ‘vacuum jacket’ to aid artificial breathing, and the founding of the National Geographic magazine.
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The project that Bell himself called his greatest achievement in 1880 he named the photophone.
This was a method of transmitting sound in a beam of light using a light sensitive selenium cell to translate the light density into electric signals.
Today the vast majority of all our telecommunication travels the globe at the speed of light along fibre optic cables.
By Ted ThaiLIFE Photo Collection
In November 1920, Bell returned to Edinburgh for a visit.
At a speech given to pupils at the city’s Royal High School, where he had been a student 60 years before, he imagined that this young generation might live to see a time when someone “in any part of the world would be able to telephone to any other part of the world without any wires at all”.
Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell (1915)LIFE Photo Collection
Alexander Graham Bell died on 2 August 1922 aged 75.
On the day of his funeral the telephone systems in the US and Canada were silenced for one minute.
