BU, Bell, and Celebrating 150 Years of the Invention of the Telephone Alexander Graham Bell was a Boston University faculty member on paid leave when he changed the world with an experiment. But his relationship with the deaf community complicates his legacy
American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) with one of his inventions, ca. 1910. Bell engineered the first intelligible electronic transmission of voice and patented the telephone. He was a founding member and president of the National Geographic Society. Photo via Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress
Innovation
BU, Bell, and Celebrating 150 Years of the Invention of the Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was a Boston University faculty member on paid leave when he changed the world with an experiment. But another chapter of his legacy is his complicated relationship with the Deaf community
In the history of inventions that have altered the course of humanity, you would be hard-pressed to name any that top the telephone. (Okay, fine, maybe the light bulb, and possibly the wheel, and, yes, penicillin’s important.) A professor at Boston University named Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone 150 years ago this year, on March 10, 1876.
“I count it as a great honor, to have belonged to Boston University,” Bell said upon being honored in 1916. “It was while I was connected with the school that all the work was done on the telephone.”
To recognize the invention’s anniversary and its roots, we’ve compiled a list of things you may, or may not, have known about Bell, BU, and the birth of the telephone.
From his childhood, starting in Scotland, Bell was fascinated by sound. As a teenager, he invented a “speaking machine” that imitated a crying baby. It sounded so real it annoyed the family’s neighbor.
He was the middle of three boys, but both his brothers died of tuberculosis. Soon after, his parents moved the family to Canada. In his early 20s, Bell settled in Boston and began teaching lipreading and oral speech at Sarah Fuller’s Horace Mann School for the Deaf.
Boston University was chartered in 1869—and only four years later, in 1873, a 26-year-old Bell was hired to teach voice and speech.
Boston University, School of Oratory, 1873. Photo via Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
Bell taught three courses as one of nine faculty members of the Boston University School of Oratory, helping people become more efficient in the use of vocal organs and the art of speaking. According to BU’s 1874 yearbook, his courses included The Culture of the Speaking Voice and Mechanism of Speech.
Bell’s relationship with the Deaf community is complicated. His mother was deaf, he took pride in teaching deaf students, he briefly taught sign language, and he married a former speech pupil, Mabel Hubbard, who was deaf. But he is also criticized by the signing Deaf community for his involvement in the American eugenics movement. He first opposed intermarriage between deaf people, believing it would increase the deaf population, only to soften his position later in life by acknowledging people should marry whom they choose. He presented a paper to the National Academy of Sciences arguing to prevent the creation of a “deaf race.” And he wanted more training for oral-only teaching methods and he advocated to cut deaf teachers and sign language from classrooms. His work to advance speech technology and oral education, along with his concerns about a deaf race, have helped shape Bell’s complicated legacy.
Born Alexander, he actually preferred “Alec” to distinguish himself from his father Alexander Melville Bell. Melville Bell was a teacher of the deaf, and Bell’s grandfather, also named Alexander, is widely regarded as the model George Bernard Shaw used when writing the Henry Higgins character for Pygmalion.
Ear Sketch of Bell’s experimental 1876 single-pole membrane telephone. This portion of the device served as the transmitter into which Bell spoke. 1906 Photo via Popular Science Monthly Volume 69/Library of Congress
Bell’s invention of the telephone, according to many accounts, was a fluke. He had been traveling from his home in Salem to his BU classroom building on Beacon Street, and began experimenting on the telegraph between lectures. He’d become convinced he could make electric currents vibrate through wires, and thus create sound. He decided to string wires from the attic to the basement in the nearby building at 109 Court Street and conduct experiments there.
In the attic of that building, on a summer day in June 1875, Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, noticed a transmitter spring in the telegraph had stopped vibrating. He plucked the spring, and Bell heard the twang through a receiver in another room. The spring had made contact with a strip of magnetized steel in the transmitter, which produced a vibrating electrical current replicating the sound of the spring’s twang as it traveled through the wire to Bell.
Bell’s BU boss played a critical support role in the invention. Lewis B. Monroe, dean and founding head of the School of Oratory, granted Bell a paid leave to focus on his research. “Without his help,” Bell said later, “I would not have been able to get along at all.”
Bell received his patent for the telephone on March 3, 1876, his 29th birthday—despite the fact he did not yet actually have a working telephone.
Thomas Watson holding a model of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone. 1931 Photo via Library of Congress
Bell was on sabbatical, living and working out of his lab at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, when he and Watson had their now-famous “phone call” on March 10, 1876. They had conducted hundreds of experiments, uttering phrases and words from separate rooms into their device, only to be disappointed at the distortion and faint sounds. This day was different. Bell said, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Watson, standing by a receiver in another room, rushed in and told Bell he had heard his voice—clearly! It was the world’s first intelligible telephone transmission.
It could be argued that Bell also invented the idea for what would eventually become the iPhone. In 1880, Bell, working in Washington, D.C., with his assistant, Charles Sumner Tainter, conceived of a way to transmit speech on a beam of light. Bell took out patents for something he called the “photophone,” an invention—not the telephone—he later called his “greatest achievement.” It essentially was the earliest hint of what would become fiber-optic communications.
Boston University initially hoped to honor Bell by erecting a 375-foot tower bearing his name—part of a giant complex behind where Marsh Chapel stands today. The Great Depression of 1929 doomed the plan.
BU honors Bell today through the Alexander Graham Bell Professorship of Health Care Entrepreneurship, held by Avrum Spira (ENG’02), also a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics.
Mr. Bell. Photo via Harris & Ewing Collection/Library of Congress
Bell’s words reflecting on the role of BU in the invention of the telephone stand today: “Gentlemen,” he concluded in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of his invention, “these things which I have described are the by-products of my work in your institution, and were made possible because of the encouragement of your university.”
Bell died on August 2, 1922. During his funeral a couple days later, telephone service across the United States and Canada was stopped for one minute in his honor.
