the first telephone 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell [3D animation]

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the first telephone 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell [3D animation]
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847. At the age of eleven he chose to add the middle name of Graham, which stuck for the rest of his life.
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.His father’s work focused on developing a system of ‘visible speech’, which allowed speech sounds to be written down. He aimed to use this visualisation as a means of teaching deaf people to speak, without them ever having heard words spoken. Encouraged by his father, young Bell attempted to make working models of ear and vocal cords, aiming to create a mechanical speech device. He attended classes in anatomy and physiology in London for a couple of years, building his understanding of how speech and hearing worked.
Following the death of both of Bell’s brothers from tuberculosis, in 1870 the family emigrated to a healthier life in Canada. Building on his father’s earlier work on the human voice, Bell started teaching deaf students in Boston, moving to the United States in 1871. Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.
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.Alexander Graham Bell did not think he was inventing a ‘telephone’ during his early experiments. He was working on the holy grail of the day: sending multiple telegraph messages over the same wire. He aimed to make electro-mechanical devices capable of transmitting and receiving different tones for each message. Through study and experimentation, Bell hypothesised that if sound waves could be converted into a fluctuating electric current, that current could then be reconverted into sound waves identical to the original at the other end of the circuit.
He was supported financially in this work by Gardiner Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer and politician, whose deaf daughter, Mabel, had been taught to lip-read and speak by Bell. Bell fell in love with Mabel. Her father, being aware of Bell’s experiments with possible ‘speaking telegraph’ devices, refused his permission for the couple to marry until Bell had successfully developed his new invention. To speed matters along, he also funded an assistant, Thomas Watson.
Sensing the danger of rival developments for this valuable invention, Bell’s future father-in-law filed an application for ‘Improvements in Telegraphy’ on 14 February 1876. On that very same day a few hours later - or was it actually a few hours earlier? - inventor Elisha Gray filed his own idea for a telephone device at the same office. Bell was granted the patent on 7 March 1876.
Just three days later, on 10 March 1876, his first intelligible telephone communication was made. Bell was in his laboratory with this latest experimental version of a telephone transmitter. In Bell’s bedroom, Watson waited with a reed receiver pressed against his ear. Two days later, Bell described what happened in his laboratory notebook:On 9 July 1877, Bell, Hubbard, Watson (and other funders) established the Bell Telephone Company to market the new device. Bell and Mabel married two days later.
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.
Rough sketch in black ink by Alexander Graham Bell of how a telephone works, with multiple cones and wires and people speaking into them.
Above: Bell’s drawing of the telephone, 1876. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
On 11 August 1877, Bell and Mabel arrived in Britain from the USA on honeymoon. In Bell’s luggage was his new communication device, the telephone. Bell travelled the country promoting his invention, even demonstrating the device to Queen Victoria, who was so amused she asked to keep the temporary installation in place. The first telephones - called box telephones because of their shape - went on sale later that year.