Image: Alexander Graham Bell, his wife Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, and their daughters Elsie (left) and Marian ca. 1885. (Public Domain)

On this day in history, March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his invention of the telephone. Born from his work on the harmonic telegraph – a device that allowed multiple messages to be sent over a wire at the same time (1871) – the invention of the telephone would revolutionize society like no other invention before it. Bell, as his father, grandfather, and brother before him, had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and his mother and wife were both deaf, profoundly influencing Bell’s life work. His research on hearing and speech would lead him to experiment with hearing devices, ultimately helping him to invent the telephone in 1876. Bell regarded the telephone as such an encroachment on his real work as a scientist that he refused to have one placed in his workshop.

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was a professor of speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh, and his mother, despite her deafness, was an accomplished pianist. Alexander was a curious child who studied piano and began inventing things early on. Both of his brothers died from tuberculosis when Bell was in his twenties. In his early years, he was homeschooled. Alexander did not thrive academically, yet he was an astute problem solver from an early age.

At 12, Alexander invented a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes to remove husks from wheat grain. It was put to use in a friend’s family’s flour mill. His friend’s father gave the boys space to work on their inventing in payment for the husking device.

At 16, Bell began studying the mechanics of speech. He attended Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh. In 1870 Bell, along with his family, moved to Canada. The next year he moved to the Boston, Massachusetts area. While in the United States, Alexander implemented a system that his father created to teach deaf children called “visible speech” – a set of symbols that represented speech sounds.

In 1872, Bell started the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, where he taught deaf people to speak. At age 26, the budding inventor became a Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory, despite having no university credentials. During his teaching, Bell met Mabel Hubbard, a deaf student. The couple would marry on July 11, 1877. They would go on to have four children.

At the time, Western Union began working with inventors Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison to find a method to transmit multiple telegraphs on each telegraph line to avoid the horrendous cost of building new lines. When Bell divulged to Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders that he was working on sending multiple voices on a telegraph wire using a multi-reed device, the two wealthy patrons began to support Bell’s work financially.

 Bell and Pollok visited scientist Joseph Henry in March 1875 at the Smithsonian Institution, and they asked his advice on the electrical multi-reed apparatus that Bell hoped would convey the human voice by telegraph. Henry told Bell he had “the germ of a great invention.” When Bell told Henry he did not have the necessary knowledge, Henry replied, “Get it!” However, a meeting in 1874 between Bell and Thomas Watson, an experienced electrical designer and mechanic, changed everything.

With funding from Hubbard and Sanders, Bell hired Thomas Watson as his assistant, and both worked on acoustic telegraphy. In 1875 Bell created an acoustic telegraph and filed a patent application for it. He first applied for a patent in Britain because Britain would only issue patents for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere. Meanwhile, Elisha Gray also experimented with acoustic telegraphy and found a way to transmit speech using water. On February 14, 1876, Gray filed a warning with the United States Patent Office for a telephone device that used a water transmitter. Bell had submitted his patent request a few hours before Gray, thus beating out Gray.

Bell’s patent, 174,465, was issued to him on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell’s patent covered “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically…by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds.”

On March 10, three days after his patent was given to him, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work. Bell spoke the sentence “Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you” into the transmitter; Watson, listening on the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly.

By 1877, the Bell Telephone Company, today known as AT&T, was created. 1915 Bell executed the first transcontinental telephone call to Watson from New York City to San Francisco.

The inventor faced a 20-year legal battle with other scientists, including Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci, who claimed they created telephone prototypes before Bell’s patent. In 1887, the U.S. government tried to remove the patent issued to Bell, but after a series of legal rulings, the Bell company won a Supreme Court decision. While the Bell Company faced over 600 court clashes, in the end, none were successful.

Alexander Graham Bell died on August 2, 1922, at 75, in Nova Scotia, Canada. The cause of his death was problems with diabetes. His wife and two daughters survived him.

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