Alexander Graham Bell is one of the most famous inventors; he is also one of my heroes, because he led such a colourful life. This column tells readers of Business Standard history; it was published on 12 October 1999.
The later lives of Bell and
Watson
Everyone knows that Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A
Watson invented the telephone in 1876. Bell died in 1922, Watson in 1934. Their
invention made them rich at a young age. What did they do with the rest of
their lives?
In 1876, Bell was a 29-year-old
man of no fixed occupation. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was professor
of elocution in London University; he coached actors, and taught the deaf to
speak (both he and his son married deaf women). Alexander Graham Bell (Alec)
left school at 11. At 16 he went to Elgin, and by neglecting to state his age,
got a job as a schoolteacher.
By then, however, his father was
gaining a reputation as a teacher of elocution. He was invited to give lectures
at Lowell Institute in Boston in 1868; Alec went with him to America.
Alec’s elder brother died of
tuberculosis in 1866, and his younger brother in 1870, leaving him as the last
sibling alive. Alec was also diagnosed with tuberculosis. Fearful that he too
may die, his father gave up his professorship and migrated to Canada. On
recovering his health, Alec set up a School of Vocal Physiology in Boston in
1872.
At that time his father told Alec
about a paper by Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz on the use of electric
tuning forks to produce vowel sounds. Alec got hold of the paper, but did not
understand it since it was in German. He thought Helmholtz had transmitted
speech electrically. That misconception fired him, and he began experiments to
do the same.
For help with the construction of
the device, he turned to the 20-year-old Thomas Watson in 1874. Watson worked
in a local workshop as a machinist. At that time there was no mass production,
accuracy required manual dexterity, and people who had it were prized. Watson
was one of them. In his spare time, Watson went to mediums and dabble in
psychic phenomena; he also went to beaches and declaimed poetry.
The idea of the telephone started
from the telegraph. The telegraph had been invented in 1837 by William Cooke,
who had served as a soldier of the East India Company and had been sent back to
England on account of ill health. He patented it together with Charles
Wheatstone, professor of natural philosophy at London University. Samuel Finley
Breeze Morse, who invented an alphabet consisting of dots and dashes, turned it
into a practical device. In a telegraph, an electric current sent down a wire
made a reed magnet at the other end vibrate; a pen attached to it put down dots
and dashes in the pattern conveyed by the wire. The first telegraphic message
was sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844: it was “What hath God wrought?”
By the 1870s, America was crisscrossed with telegraphic wires owned by a
mammoth monopoly, Western Union. Bell and Watson’s idea was to make reed
magnets reproduce human speech instead of dots and dashes.
Bell was busy giving speech
lessons by day and making experiments at night. He was earning little and
always in debt. But he was giving lessons to Mabel, the deaf daughter of
Gardiner Hubbard, who was rich and more practical than Bell.
Bell had gnawing doubts about his
telephone. But he was not the only one working on the idea; many were in the
race. Hubbard filed patent papers for him without his knowledge, and thus
closely beat Elisha Gray. Hubbard also drove Bell to exhibit his telephone at
the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia celebrating the centenary of
independence of the United States in 1876. There the telephone caught the fancy
of Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, who inaugurated the Exposition. It also
brought Bell in contact with Lord Kelvin, one of Britain’s foremost scientists
who visited the Exposition and carried the word of the invention to Britain.
Although the telephone was shown
to work, it was still to make some money. Bell started giving lecture
demonstrations with it. The money he earned from them was enough to relieve him
of his debts and marry Mabel in July 1877. They left for Britain on honeymoon,
and returned fifteen months later. Bell
had little to do with the commercialization of the telephone; Hubbard and
Watson organized it.
They offered the patent rights to
Western Union for $100,000. It rejected the offer; instead, it began to sell
and instal telephones in breach of the patent. Watson filed a Nsuit and won it;
Western Union had to sell its telephone business to National Bell Company,
which was formed in February 1879. The early history of Bell Telephone was full
of suits, financial crises and intrigue. But it was also a story of explosive
growth, which made Bell and Watson millionaires.
Bell took American nationality in
1882, built a huge mansion in Washington and settled down. He built a country
house at Cape Breton in Canada and spent summers there. He lived a life of
leisure, entertained lavishly, played the piano, read literature to guests, and
indulged in amateur dramatics.
On the beach at Cape Breton he
began to fly kites. He designed various kites, some as big as a room. Big kites
collapse in high wind; to give them strength with the least addition to weight,
Bell invented the tetrahedron or four-cornered, three-dimensional pyramid; it
led later to the trapezoid structures of Frank Lloyd Wright, and continues to
be used in structures. With some friends he experimented with motorized kites,
and invented the aileron and the tricycle undercarriage. Then he became
interested in hydrofoils, and built one in 1919. It reached a speed of 70 miles
an hour – a marine record it held for 10 years.
Watson retired from Bell at 27,
and sailed for Liverpool in 1881. He traveled to Norway, Denmark, Germany and
Switzerland, where he spent some time learning French. Then he went to Italy,
learnt Italian, and worked for a while as a tourist guide in Rome.
On returning to Boston, he
married Elizabeth Kimball, and bought a farm at East Braintree, Massachusetts,
on which he introduced state-of-the-art mechanization. But soon he lost
interest in farming. He set up a machine shop on the farm and started making
steam engines for boats.
Then Elizabeth and he joined MIT
and studied geology and paleontology. Meanwhile, his engine shop prospered; he
went on to build destroyers, cruisers and submarines. At that point his company
failed; in 1903, he was forced out of the company, and lost his entire
investment. For a time he earned a living as prospector and by means of public
readings.
In 1910, at the age of 56, he
left for England and joined Frank Benson’s Shakespearean Company. Starting as a
member of crowd scenes, he rose to doing secondary parts, and wrote plays for
the company based on Dickens’s novels. After two years of travel he returned to
Boston, where he spent the rest of his life in amateur dramatics, elocution and
geological exploration.
So there is life after early
success for those who made their million before they were 30; they do not have
to sink into sloth and drink.
