Unfortunately, it was around this time that the fatal disease called the ‘white plague’ spread through Britain and both Alexander’s brothers died. As a result Alexander and his parents left the country and moved to Canada. Alexander was teaching to a tribe of Mohawk Indians in a small Canadian town called Brantford, 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. He became so successful that he soon opened his own school called ‘The School of Vocal Physiology’. 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.
She was a young girl who had lost her hearing and the ability to speak because of a childhood illness. Her name was 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, Alexander refused to give up his dream. He even copied the design of the human ear using iron rods and electrical wires to produce the same effect.
Alexander was spending so much 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, but he also continued working on his mechanical voice transmitter. On that summer afternoon in 1875, when Alexander heard the first sound transmitted over his machine, he realized that he had finally achieved his goal. 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.