The box telephone was the first model of telephone to go on sale. But can its creator, Alexander Graham Bell, truly lay claim to the title ‘inventor of the telephone’?

Who was Alexander Graham Bell?

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. He wanted to create a mechanical speech device. He attended classes in anatomy and physiology in London for a couple of years. Here he built 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. In 1871 Bell moved to the United States. Building on his father’s earlier work on the human voice, he started teaching deaf students in Boston. 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.

The patent for the telephone

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. Hubbard's daughter Mabel was deaf and had been taught to lip-read and speak by Bell. Bell fell in love with Mabel. Her father 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.

Bell’s future father-in-law sensed the danger of rival developments for this valuable invention. So he 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.

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.

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. He even demonstrated the device to Queen Victoria. She 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.

Other telephone pioneers

Bell's patent is sometimes described as the most valuable patent ever filed. For years following the award, Alexander Graham Bell had to defend it in expensive and protracted litigation battles brought by a whole range of inventors. In 2002, the US Congress formally recognised Italian Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone. This is based on prototypes he demonstrated in 1860. Bell and Meucci had shared a workshop in the 1870s. Meucci was pursuing his claim in the Supreme Court when he died in 1889. France and Germany cite their own contenders for the title.

In many respects, Bell’s telephone was flawed. His receiver and transmitter designs were considerably improved by others within a couple of years. Among those were Thomas Edison and Professor David Hughes. Both produced improvements to Bell’s early instrument, transforming the telephone into a truly successful communication device.

Thomas Edison patented a more efficient transmitter. This made longer distance calls a realistic prospect. After several court cases accusing each other of patent infringements, Bell and Edison joined forces. In 1880 they formed the United Telephone Company in Britain.

Welsh engineer and Professor of music David Hughes was a pioneer in microphone technology. This hugely improved Bell’s first devices from 1878. Rather than patent his improvement, he published the details, making them available to all. His later work on radio waves enabled early experiments with wireless communication in the 1880s.

Later inventions

Still widely known as ‘the inventor of the telephone’, Bell had given up his interest in this invention by his early thirties. He spent the rest of his life with Mabel and their family in Canada, working on a series of varied projects. This included flight, sheep breeding, and developing a ‘vacuum jacket’ to aid artificial breathing. He also founded National Geographic magazine. 

The project which Bell himself called his greatest achievement in 1880 he named the ‘photophone’. This was a method of transmitting sound in a beam of light using a light-sensitive selenium cell to translate the light density into electric signals. He succeeded in sending sounds via light over a few hundred metres. The photophone concept was trialled during World War I, this time much closer to home. Engineers from University College London and the Admiralty tested the idea across the Firth of Forth as a way of communicating between ships.

Today the vast majority of all our telecommunication travels the globe at the speed of light along fibre optic cables. Perhaps closer to Bell's original idea is the work of Professor Harald Haas at the University of Edinburgh, the city of Bell's birth. Haas’ development of ‘LiFi’ – a method of sending huge amounts of data via light – might revolutionise the way we all communicate in the future.

For Bell, his foremost passion remained enabling deaf people to lip read and speak to help them blend into a hearing world. This was in itself controversial to sections of the deaf community. It could be seen as disenfranchising those who preferred to communicate using sign language, which they viewed as the primary language of the deaf.

Bell’s last visit to Edinburgh was in November 1920. He gave a speech to pupils at the city’s Royal High School, where he had been a student 60 years before. He imagined that this young generation might live to see a time when someone “in any part of the world would be able to telephone to any other part of the world without any wires at all.”

He died on 2 August 1922 aged 75. On the day of his funeral, the telephone systems in the US and Canada were silenced for one minute.