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Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)
Present Form of Multiple Telegraph  1878
Bell Family Papers, box 291, folder 272 00112
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

 

Alexander Graham Bell's precursor to the telephone
1878

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Library of Congress
Washington DC
United States

Alexander Graham Bell is known throughout the world for inventing the telephone. His motivation for improving communications came from his daily life. From his earliest days Bell knew the world of silence—his mother was nearly deaf, and young Alec served as her interpreter. He was also well-acquainted with speech, as the Bell family had been recognised for two generations as leading authorities in elocution and speech correction.

Bell's work on a 'multiple telegraph' led him to the experiments that produced electrical transmission of speech, and thus the telephone. Thomas Watson assisted Bell with the mechanical realisation of the idea. Their combined invention of the first telegraph that could transmit intelligible speech became the subject of ongoing patent infringement cases (this drawing was the complainants' exhibit number 37). The United States Supreme Court held that Bell and Watson were the first to conceive and apply the undulatory current—the technique that succeeded in transmitting speech—where other inventions had failed. Bell noted: 'First attempt to transmit the human voice. The varying pitch of the voice could be discriminated but not the quality. A sort of muttering effect was perceived at the receiving end when a person talked very loudly at the other end'. This experiment led to Bell's invention of the photophone, which was founded on the same principle as today's laser and fibre optic communication systems.

The clear handwriting of the description displayed here is that of Bell's wife Mabel, who often transcribed his sometimes untidy notebooks; Bell himself added the drawing. As we can see from his sketch of the telegraph, which became the telephone, Bell was not a skilled draftsman. He was, however, a man of great vision, with many innovations in a variety of fields to his credit.