Telephones - A History - The Beginnings

This begins a series of articles on one of the greatest and most important inventions of all time, the telephone.

The period was the 1870s. During that time two inventors by the name of Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently laid out the design for devices that could allow people to transmit their speech by electronic means. The two of them rushed their inventions to the patent office, literally within hours of each other. Never before in history had this happened and it hasn't happened since. It turned out that Bell patented his phone first and was given credit for the invention. Gray and Bell then got into a very famous legal battle over this patent which Bell ultimately won. So right from the beginning, history could have turned out differently.

The telegraph, which was already in existence at the time, was a wire based system just like Bell's telephone. In reality, Bell's success with the telephone was from his attempts to actually improve the telegraph. The telephone was just an accident from these attempts.

When Bell began working with and experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had already been in existence for over 30 years and was an established means of communication. And even though, for the time, it was a fairly sophisticated system using dot and dash Morse code, the telegraph was still limited to sending just one message at a time and was very slow. It was Bell's understanding of sound and of music that made it so that he was able to visualise sending multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Even though the idea of a multiple telegraph had existed for quite some time, Bell argued that his musical and harmonic idea was the best solution to this problem. He said that different notes could be sent over the telegraph at the same time if they were of different pitch.

It wasn't until 1874, in October of that year, that Bell's research had gotten to the point where he could tell his future father in law, attorney Gardiner Hubbard, about his idea of the multiple telegraph. Hubbard was against the total control that Western Union telegraph had over the industry and thought that this invention had the potential for breaking up such a powerful monopoly. Because of this, he gave Bell the financial backing that he needed. It was at that time after receiving the money that Bell began work on his multiple telegraph. What he didn't tell Hubbard was that he and a man by the name of Thomas Watson, an electrician he had hired to help him, were also working on an idea that Bell had come up with that summer. The idea was to create a device that could transmit speech electrically. The reason that Bell didn't tell Hubbard about this idea was twofold. For one thing, he didn't want to get him excited about something that quite possibly wouldn't happen. Also, he didn't want to risk the possibility of losing backing because he was working on other things besides what they agreed on. So he kept this a secret.

In the next part in this series we'll pick up with Bell's meeting with the director of the Smithsonian Institute, Joseph Henry.

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Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Telephones
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