One hot afternoon in June, about forty years ago, a young man was
standing in a grimy workshop by the side of a crude little machine
composed of a clock spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. He was bending
over this queer machine listening intently. Suddenly he bent nearer, a
startled look of excitement upon his face. From the clock spring had
come a faint, almost inaudible sound. The young man straightened up
and ran into an adjoining room, where another man stood near a second
instrument similar to the first.
“Snap that reed again!” he cried excitedly.
The assistant obeyed him, and again came that faint twang from the
spring in the front room. The telephone was born!
And the man who accomplished this wonder was a poor young professor of
elocution in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell. He was not an American by
birth. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 1, 1847. His father
was Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of a system by which the deaf
can read speech by observing the motion of the lips.
The Bell family moved to Canada in 1870, and Alexander, the younger,
took up teaching the deaf and dumb in Boston. He became instructor
of phonetics, or the science of articulate sound, in Monroe’s School
of Oratory. He was a hard worker, but poor. One time when he had
rheumatism his employer had to pay his hospital expenses.
It was about this time that Bell began experimenting with the
transmission of sound by electricity. For a number of years other
people had been trying to do this. Sir Charles Wheatstone in England
had discovered that wires charged with electricity often carried noises
in a curious way. In 1869 Reis, a German professor, constructed an
instrument that sent a series of clicks along an electric wire to an
electromagnetic receiver at the other end. And others were turning
their attention to this interesting phase of telegraphy.
But it was Alexander Graham Bell who first succeeded in grasping the
correct idea. A few months after the incident described above, on a day
in January, 1876, he called some of his pupils into a room and showed
them an instrument that transmitted singing from the cellar of the
building to where they were on the fourth floor.
People were at first slow to appreciate the importance of this great
invention: but gradually they came to see its value, and today there
are over seven million telephones in use in the United States alone.
Money and honors have poured in upon the inventor, who still lives
to enjoy his triumph. His income is said to be more than $1,000,000
a year. In 1880 the French government awarded him the Volta prize of
$10,000, and two years later he received from the same country the
ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 29, SERIAL No. 29
[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON]
_GREAT AMERICAN INVENTORS_
_Thomas Alva Edison_