Portraits of Inventors: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell

Two of the most famous U.S. inventors of the nineteenth century—Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell—were born less than three weeks apart in 1847. Edison originally hailed from Milan, Ohio, and Bell from Edinburgh, Scotland. By the 1870s, both were working in the United States and had invented new technologies that revolutionized daily life.

Bell (shown here at top right), by contrast, did not consider inventing his primary occupation. He began his career teaching students at schools for the Deaf in Great Britain and the United States. His interest in the mechanisms of speech directed his work as an inventor.    

Bell secured thirty U.S. patents over his lifetime. His inventions—though not as plentiful as Edison’s—were no less impactful. Bell is most famous for creating the first practical telephone (1876) and an improved phonograph that he called the graphophone (1885–86).

Edison and Bell, both famous during their lifetimes, used portraiture to shape their public image and draw attention to their inventions. Let’s look closely at some of their portraits in the National Portrait Gallery’s collections.

Many portraits of Edison show the inventor ostensibly working in his laboratory. In this cyanotype, Edison dons a laboratory jacket and holds glass beakers. The photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson worked for Edison and ran a profitable side business selling portraits of his employer.

Edison’s visage entered middle-class homes through various means, including stereographs like this one made by Underwood & Underwood. It bears the inscription, “MOST FAMOUS INVENTOR OF THE AGE, THOMAS A. EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY,” while the biographical text on back claims, “If history is the story of man’s progress, then Edison will hold an important place in our American History.”

Public portraits of Bell were typically made in conjunction with demonstrations and commemorations of the telephone. Here, Bell stands beside a plaque that marks the site in Boston where he and his assistant Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound—the vibrations of a plucked reed—across a telephone wire.

This photograph of Bell was made in New York City on October 18, 1892, at the formal opening of the first long-distance telephone line between New York and Chicago. At the time of its installation, it was the longest telephone line in operation.

Edison created a carbon-button transmitter (1877–78) that greatly improved the distance over which sound could be transmitted by telephone. This print illustrates Bell and Edison's inventions side-by-side, revealing the two men's contributions to this revolutionary technology.

It was also Edison’s idea to commence a phone call with the word “Hello” (Bell suggested using “Ahoy”).

Working with Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, Bell developed wax cylinders for recording sound that proved superior to Edison’s original tinfoil devices for the phonograph. Between 1887 and 1889, Edison used the improvements by Bell and his colleagues to make further advances in phonograph and wax-cylinder technologies.

Edison and Bell, together with their collaborators, created some of most commercially successful new technologies of the late nineteenth century. Portraits of the two men helped ensure that the inventors were as well known to the public as their inventions.