RITA

The young professor was working in his workshop in a narrow street in Boston, not far from scollay 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 on 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 system to help people with 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. Sadly. a few years later, while working in London.Alexander met two men who would play an important role in his life. Mr Alexander Ellis, a professor of philology, and Sir Charles Wheatstone, an expert in telegraphy, started him thinking about sending sounds through a machine.

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. At that time he had another student who greatly influenced his life.

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 taught that invent a human voice transmitter was a waste of time, Alexander 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 much time and energy on his inventions he did 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. Professor Henry realized immediately that Alexander had made an amazing discovery and encouraged him to continue with his experiments.

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 ‘an improvement in telegraphy’. The name ‘telephone’ came later.