Late great engineers: Alexander Graham Bell - founding father of audio communications

On 3 August 1922, the day after the death of Alexander Graham Bell, the New York Times published a long obituary describing how the Scottish-born inventor and scientist had ‘lived to see the telephonic instrument over which he talked a distance of twenty feet in 1876 used, with improvements, for the transmission of speech across the continent’, eventually extending his transmissions across the Atlantic. More than that, the ‘little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world. The Bell basic patent, the famed No. 174,465, which he received on his twenty-ninth birthday and which was sustained in a historic court fight, has been called the most valuable patent ever issued.’

A century later, and the ‘member of many leading American societies of learning’ is a central figure in a controversy that shows few signs of abating. Today, there is vigorous debate over the legitimacy of the claim that Bell was the inventor of the telephone, a technology that evolved out of a period of intense multiple discovery. There’s even disagreement with the National that describes the co-founder of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) as ‘Scotland’s Greatest Inventor’. This is because both the United States and Canada claim Bell as their own. Few remember him as the inventor of, as the New York Times reminds us, ‘a new method of lithography, a photophone, and an induction balance,’ who spent ‘fifteen years and more than $200,000 in testing his tetrahedral kite, which he believed would be the basis for aviation.’ Britannica (of which Bell was an avid reader, scouring its pages for new areas of interest) adopts a neutral tone, describing Bell as a ‘teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments were the invention of the telephone (1876) and the refinement of the phonograph (1886).’