The young professor was working in his workshop in a narrow street in Boston, a few steps from scullery square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the man didn't notice. He was totally absorbed in his strange machine which he had been working for about three years. Suddenly he heard an almost inaudible sound, the first sound ever transmitted through a wire. The machine was the very first telephone and the young man was Alexander Graham Bell.
Although he was only 28 years old at the time, Alexander had been working in the fields of speech, anatomy, electricity and telegraphy for over 11 years. His grandfather had invented a speech problems. In fact, his whole family had been involved in the study of speech and sounds. Alexander’s father had also written several books on how to speak correctly as well as creating a form of sign language called ‘visible speech’.
At the age of 16 Alexander started to help teach young deaf mutes;children who could not hear or speak. He used his father’s system of ‘visible speech’and achieved amazing results. A few years later,while working in London, Alexander met two men who would play an important role in his life.
Unfortunately,it was around this time that the fatal disease called the white plague, spread through Britain and both Alexander's brother died. Alexander was teaching to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in a small Canadian town called Brant ford, when the Boston Board of Education asked him to come and work in the USA at a new school for deaf mutes.
Alexander was very happy to move to Boston and continue the work he had started in Britain. However,he was so busy there that he did not have the time to work on his inventions.
Then,two years later,he agreed to give private lessons to a young boy whose family allowed him to use their basement as a workshop. This gave Alexander the opportunity to resume his experiments with sound transmitters. He used to spend all his free time, and most of his money, on his inventions.
Mabel Hubbard,and four years later they got married. Although many people thought that the plan to invent a human voice transmitter was a waste of time, refused to give up his dream. He continued his experiments with sound vibrations. He even copied the design of the human ear using iron rods and electrical wires to produce the same effect.
Alexander was spending so mush time and energy on his inventions he did less and less work with his students and soon ran out of money.He was about to give up when he met Professor John Henry,an expert on the telegraph and electricity.
In order to survive financially Bell had to work on the musical telegraph, buy he also continued working on his mechanical voice transmitter. Almost a year later, in March 1876, the first words were heard coming through the phone.
On his 29th birthday Alexander Graham Bell registered his invention with the patent office and, because they had never seen anything like it before,they registered his invention as 'an improvement in telegraphy'. The name 'telephone' came later.