Alexander Graham Bell. The early life and genius of the inventor.

The early years

Alexander Graham bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. He received his primary education from his parents and tutors as was then the custom. He inherited his mother's musical ability and in later life he said he could not remember a time when he could not play the piano. As a small child he could play by hear and improvise at the piano for long periods.


Birth entry for Alexander Graham Bell (Source: National Records of Scotland)	Alexander Graham Bell’s birthplace, 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, Scotland.

1851 Scotland Census (Source: National Records of Scotland)

Alexander Graham Bell and Royal High School classmates, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1858.

Seated in the foreground are Alexander Melville Bell and his wife, Eliza Grace (née Symonds). They are surrounded by their sons, from l-r: Alexander Graham, Melville James and Edward Charles, 1860.
His scholastic career, at McLaren’s Academy and the Royal High School, was by no means brilliant. He likes music, botany and natural history, which formed no part of the school curriculum, and he disliked intensely Latin and Greek, then mainstays of formal education. Before he left high school in 1862, he had already made his first invention – a scheme for facilitating the removal of husks in a grain mill, based upon the principle of a nail brush.
Alexander Graham Bell, aged 15 and 17. The photograph on the left was taken by Bell's father at the family’s country home, Milton Cottage, Trinity, Edinburgh, 1862.
That same year, Graham and his brothers assisted their father, Alexander Melville Bell, in public demonstrations of Visible Speech – a code of symbols that indicate the position and action of the throat, tongue and lips in uttering various sounds. At about this time, too, Graham enrolled as a student teacher at Weston House, a boy’s school near Edinburgh. There he taught music and elocution in exchange for instruction on other subjects. Later, after study at the University of Edinburgh, he became a full-time teacher. He also founds time to qualify for studies at the University of London and to use Visible Speech in teaching a class of hearing-impaired children. While carrying a series of experiments on voice and sounds, he could not dismiss from his mind the possibility of “telegraphing” speech, though he had no idea how to do it. It was not until 1867 that he became interested in electricity and installed a telegraph wire from his room to that of a friend.
Visible speech symbols invented by Alexander Melville Bell used for training hearing-impaired persons to produce words.
Then, in 1870, disaster uprooted the Bell family. Graham’s younger brother had already died of tuberculosis and now, the elder brother, Melville James, dies from the same disease. Doctors gave warning that Graham was also threatened. His father did not hesitate and sacrificed his teaching career in London to sail with his family in Canada. Within six days of the arrival in the country, on August 1870, the family bought a house in Brantford, Ontario, now known as the Bell Homestead.

The birth of a great invention

July 26, 1874 marked the culmination of many months of experiments, during which young inventor Alexander Graham Bell gradually developed a working telephone from a concept he had described to his father, Melville Bell, at the Bell homestead near Brantford, Ontario. His diagrams and many notes, along with his father’s diary, helped prove Bell’s claim that he had indeed invented the telephone.


During his stay in Brantford in the summer of 1874, A.G. Bell studied the patterns of speech waves made visible by a device called “phonautograph”. The user would speak into a conical trumpet, across the narrow end of which was stretched a membrane or diaphragm. Arranged to vibrate in unison with the diaphragm, a bristle then traced the patterns of speech waves upon a plate of smoked glass as it moved across it. The speaking trumpet and membrane of the phonautograph would later become the mouthpiece and diaphragm of the telephone transmitter.

On June 3, 1875, Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, built the first telephone—called “Gallows Frame” due to its design. Speech sounds were heard, but not words or sentences; as Watson put it later, he recognized Bell’s voice and what he heard were the strong vocal or vowel sounds. Here’s a short film on the Gallows Frame device.	The “Liquid Transmitter”, another type of telephone that A.G. Bell tested on March 10, 1876, transmitted the world’s first complete sentence by the means of electricity (listen to Thomas Watson’s narration of the events by clicking above). That same year, the inventor made the world’s first long-distance call between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, using a 13km telegraph line.

Bell’s Double Pole Membrane Transmitter and Iron Box Receiver were used in 1876 to transmit and receive the world’s first one-way long-distance telephone call from Brantford to Paris, Ontario. Canada’s first two-way long-distance telephone conversation took place between Montréal and Québec in 1877.
	Specifications for the first telephone patent were written in Brantford in September 1875. The American patent was granted to Bell in 1876 and the Canadian patent in 1877 (shown on image).

The first telephone business office in Canada

In 1877, A.G. Bell transferred 75% of the Canadian patent rights on the telephone to his father, Professor Alexander Melville Bell. After receiving the Canadian rights from his son, Melville Bell and agent Thomas Henderson began promoting the telephone business in Canada. The telephone’s commercial career took off.

At the time, lines were strung between pairs of telephones, and conversation was only possible from one end to the other. Subscribers who wanted to communicate from home to office and home to factory had to own four telephones: two at home, one at the office and one at the factory, along with two lines (home to office and home to factory).


Melville Bell	Thomas Henderson
Scientific American clipping showing two people using wooden hand telephones. Front page of Scientific American, showing A.G. Bell in Salem, Massachusetts, lecturing and demonstrating the wooden box telephone connected to his laboratory in Boston, 14 miles away (1877).	House at 30 Sheridan Street (formerly #46), Brantford, Ontario. It was here that Reverend Thomas Henderson established the first telephone office in the British Empire. Contract between Melville Bell and the Honourable Alexander Mackenzie for the lease of two hand telephones and two box telephones (1877).
The camera-like wooden-box telephone was the first telephone intended for commercial use. The circular opening was used as both receiver and transmitter. Two of these devices, along with two hand telephones, were the first to be rented in Canada and connected the office of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie at Rideau Hall to Governor General Lord Dufferin’s private residence.

Manufacturing the first telephones

While Melville Bell owned 75% of the Canadian patent rights, the remaining were assigned to inventor Charles Williams Jr. of Boston, Massachusetts, who, in exchange, was to supply 1,000 telephones at no charge. After this transaction, two major difficulties soon became apparent. First, the demand in the United States for telephones, for which Mr. Williams had been paid, became so great that he fell behind in meeting the orders placed by Melville Bell. Second, the Canadian customs charges that Mr. Bell had to pay for each telephone manufactured in the United States were heavy. In addition, patent laws required that Canadians stop importing telephones shortly after the patent was issued in 1877.

It became clear that telephones needed to be manufactured in Canada. Arrangements were made for electrician James Cowherd of Brantford to learn how to make telephones at Mr. William’s factory, and in December 1878, Mr. Cowherd started manufacturing them. As orders increased, he built a new factory—the first in Canada that was designed specifically for making telephones. On December 15, 1878, the first rubber hand telephone was officially tested and declared a success. The same year, Hamilton received the first shipment for use in that city.

James H. Cowherd continued manufacturing telephones and related equipment for the Bell Telephone Company of Canada until his sudden death at age 31, in February 1881. In total, he produced over 2,400 telephones.


Original bill for telephone equipment purchased by Thomas Henderson, General Agent of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada to Charles Williams Jr., Authorized Manufacturer for the National Bell Telephone Company, 1877.

In 1878, James H. Cowherd built the first factory in Canada specifically designed for manufacturing telephones. The factory was located at 32 Wharf Street, Brantford, Ontario. The building was demolished in 1992.
	Portrait of James H. Cowherd, circa 1880

Connecting more and more subscribers

The telephone rapidly went from object of curiosity to everyday item; indeed, more and more subscribers wanted to connect. The first exchange in Canada (ninth in the world and first outside of the United States) opened in 1878 in Hamilton, Ontario. The number of users, few at first, increased, and soon, it became possible to reach all major cities in the country.


In 1878, Hugh Crossart Baker established the first telephone exchange in Canada in Hamilton, Ontario.	Subscribers of the Hamilton exchange used this hand telephone as both transmitter and receiver by moving it from mouth to hear as they spoke or listened. The operator managed a seven-line switchboard with 10 subscribers per line.

List of telephone subscribers in Hamilton (1878)	This 1879 advertisement shows the new subscriber’s wall telephone, an answer to customers’ claims that fragments of their conversation were lost when the transmitter/receiver was moved from mouth to ear.

Canada’s first telephone directory (in book form) was issued by the Toronto Telephone Despatch Company in June 1879.

Advertisements for the Dominion Telegraph Company, which was appointed agent for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in Canada in 1879.

Demonstration of the telephone for Montréal journalists in 1879, in the office of the Dominion Telegraph Company, where the first Bell Canada exchange was later located. The switchboard had to curve around the room, as shown; indeed, the Company had given dimensions in inches while the manufacturer had provided them in feet.
A subscriber’s wall telephone stored in Bell’s Historical Collection.

Brantford, aka Telephone City

Was the telephone invented in Canada or the United States? There have been numerous debates over the past decades about the birthplace of one of the greatest inventions to date. For Alexander Graham Bell, there was no doubt that his first experiments took place at home, where he emigrated from Scotland and England with his family in 1870. During a speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa in June 1909, he said: “[…] it certainly is the case that the telephone was invented in Canada… Brantford has an indisputable claim to distinction and is rightfully named “Telephone City”. Here are a few glimpses into the past, witnesses to Brantford’s reputation and pride.


Bell family members at their home on Tutela Heights in Brantford, Ontario, in 1876. The home was donated in 1909 to the Brantford Parks Department so that it could be opened to the public. In 1977, the Bell Homestead was declared a Canadian National Historic Site.

Alexander Graham Bell (left) on the steps of the Bell Memorial on the day of its unveiling. It was erected on October 24, 1917 to commemorate the invention of the telephone in Brantford.	Billboard situated on the Mohawk Park camping grounds, Brantford, Ontario, 1928.

The statue of Alexander Graham Bell in the portico of the Bell central building at 86 Market Street. Seen on the photograph is Norman Knight, Chief Engineer (Western Area), who came up with the idea for the statue (1949).	Installation of a gigantic 302-type telephone model in Brantford. The group at this ceremony included Mayor Reg Cooper and members of the Six Nations Reserve (1955).

Excerpt from the Brantford Expositor newspaper (1936)