- Alexander, Alec Graham Bell
invented and promoted the telephone
under the influence of a deaf woman named Mabel Hubbard.
Wait, why would a deaf woman
have any interest or influence on the telephone,
an instrument she could never use?
Well, I'll tell you in this surprising love story,
and along the way, I'll talk about a crying baby machine,
mistranslation of German, a dead man's ear,
vibrating reads, pushy and influential fathers,
and why Alexander Graham Bell is known by his full name.
Ready? Let's go.
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
- It all started when Alec was 15 years old
and he and his brother went
to go see a speaking automaton machine
that they both found to be disappointingly crude.
Their father challenged them to build a better machine,
which they promptly did.
Their device ended up sounding like a baby
in great distress, shouting mama pathetically,
as they were teenagers,
they promptly used it to prank their neighbors.
So according to Bell, strangers came to the baby's aid
saying "What's the matter with that baby?"
According to Bell, the crying baby
led him on the path to the telephone.
Three years after the crying baby,
he had an argument with his father about the nature of vows,
which caused him to create his own linguistics theory.
He was disappointed to find
that his theory had already been proven correct
by a German scientist named Helmholtz.
He was excited, however,
to learn that Helmholtz had conducted his experiments
by vibrating tuning forks with electricity.
Bell thought that Helmholtz
had transmitted vowel sounds with electricity,
causing him to think that he could transmit consonant sounds
as well, and then whole speech.
Bell began to study electricity
and attempted to recreate Helmholtz's experiments
and invent the telephone.
However, it turned out that's not at all
what Helmholtz had done, but as Bell didn't read German,
he didn't realize his mistake
until well after he'd invented the telephone.
Meanwhile Alec's father who was a famous linguist,
had created a way to write any sound called visual speech.
Alec and his father would give demonstrations
where Alec would reproduce any sound
just from the visual clues.
One day he reproduced the sound in Sanskrit
by reading his father's symbols,
and a local teacher said it was difficult for students
to recreate that word, even when they could hear him.
This inspired Bell's father to use his system
to help deaf people to speak.
Neither Belle nor his father knew it,
but being a teacher for the deaf was instrumental
to Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone.
That brings us to Mabel Hubbard.
Mabel was five when she went deaf from Scarlet fever.
Her father refused to have her institutionalized
and instead hired private tutors.
She was so accomplished that when she only nine years old,
her father asked her to speak
to the Massachusetts legislature
so that they would start a school to teach others
to communicate with the hearing world, which they did.
Four years later, Alec Bell was hired by that same school
to teach deaf students to speak
using his father's visual language system.
Despite all his future achievements, from this moment on,
he defined himself first and foremost
as a teacher of the deaf.
Bell was then regularly invited to Mabel's house
and he would regale the Hubbards with his crazy ideas.
He actually had two ideas at the time.
One was to make tuning forks vibrate with electricity
to make human voice or the telephone.
And this other idea was to send multiple telegraph signals
at the same time at different frequencies,
or what's called the musical telegraph.
Mabel's father thought the telephone was nonsense,
but the telegraph was big business
and Hubbard thought that musical telegraphs
could make him a millionaire
and decided to fund Bell's research.
With funding from Hubbard,
Bell hired hired a local machinist,
20 year old Thomas Watson,
to help him with his investigations
into the musical telegraph.
Bell knew electricity creates a magnetic force
so he placed metal reeds, basically flat tuning forks,
near magnets and pulsed current through them
trying to find the trick to make only certain notes ring
and not others.
While working on this experiment,
Bell thought one of the reeds was stuck on the magnet
and asked Watson to free it.
When Watson freed the reed, it vibrated and to Bell's shock,
a separate reed vibrated in sympathy.
They experimented over and over again.
According to Bell, they didn't do anything all day
but pluck reeds.
What was going on?
Well, if you move a coil or a reed near a magnet,
it creates or induces current.
Therefore when Watson plucked a reed,
it vibrated near a magnet
creating an oscillating current and the wires.
That electricity went to the second reed
And since electricity near a magnet
creates an oscillating force, the second reed vibrated too.
Bell instantly thought of adding a cone or a membrane
to the reed and seeing if it could transmit whole words.
According to Bell, he had this inspiration
because of his teaching experiences.
See, his students used to use a device
called a photo autograph
Where you talked into a cone
and it made a needle vibrate on the other side.
So Bell knew that cones and membranes could convert sound
into oscillating physical motion.
Also, years before,
Bell had wanted to make a photo autograph
with the model of the human ear
and went to a local ear doctor to get one.
The doctor instead gave him the dismembered human ear
from a dead person.
Bell said later, quote,
"As I was holding the human ear in my hand, it struck me
that the bones of the human ear were very massive
compared to the membrane.
If such a small membrane as that
would move bones so massive in comparison,
why would not a larger membrane move a magnet?
Bell wrote to his parents,
"I have scarce been able to breathe to anybody
for fear of being thought insane.
Please keep this paper as a record
of the conception of the idea
in case anyone else at future time discover
that the vibrations of a permanent magnet
will induce a vibrating current of electricity.
However, Bell worried that the current produced
would be too small to have any effect.
Now, with these vibrating reeds,
he had proof that it would work.
He quickly attached membranes
to his vibrating reads and tried it out.
It worked, sort of.
Watson said, quote, "Why, Mr. Bell,
I heard your voice very distinctly
and could almost understand what you said."
Meanwhile, Alec had realized
that he was hopelessly in love with Mabel.
At first, his advances were coolly received
as her cousin opposed the match.
However, when Mabel almost drowned in the ocean,
she realized she did care for Bell
and rushed home to tell him.
Quickly they became a couple.
Mabel's father, Gardner, was lukewarm on the match as well.
He felt that Mabel was very young.
She was just 17 and Alec was too old, 28, and unstructured.
Mabel's father tried to use Bell's infatuation
with his daughter to get him to focus
on the musical telegraph and give up on his teaching
and on the telephone.
But Bell refused to give anything up.
"Should Mabel love me as devotedly and truly as I love her,
she will not object to any work I may engage in.
If she does not love me well enough to accept me,
then I do not want her at all.
I do not want a half love."
Mabel's father's plan backfired as just two days later
on Mabel's 18th birthday, she agreed to be engaged to Alec.
Alec then went back to working on the telephone.
Mabel's father decided that as long
as Alec was dedicated to the telephone idea,
they might as well patent it and soon.
Alec was reluctant.
Partially because they still hadn't managed
to get a decipherable speech through this machine yet.
So on Valentine's Day, 1876,
Gardner Hubbard filed for a patent for Alec's design
without telling him.
Now Alec really needed a working system.
In desperation he used the microphone designed
by another person for his musical telegraph.
On March 10th, 1876, Bell accidentally
spilled acid on his pants and shouted,
"Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."
Graham was astonished when Watson ran into the room
and told Bell he heard him clearly through the telephone.
This was the first instance of using the telephone
to transmit understandable speech.
Now that they could understand the words,
they quickly improve their speaker
by replacing the membrane with a solid metal backing.
With a better speaker, their originally microphone worked
and after some tweaking,
it worked decently at long distances.
They're ready to show it off.
Mabel's father was in charge of the educational exhibit
at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia
and wanted Bell to demonstrate his device.
Bell did not wanna go.
He said he was busy teaching, but he might've been scared
or maybe thinking that Mabel's father
was up to his old tricks with trying to derail his teaching.
Anyway, Mabel took him on a ride to the train station
and then basically cried til he got on the train.
Quote, "Who can bear to see a young girl weep?
I just jumped on that train.
I didn't have baggage or anything else
and growling like a bear, I went to Philadelphia."
In Philadelphia, the emperor of Brazil, Don Pedro,
stopped by to talk to Bell
as he was interested in his thoughts
on teaching deaf students.
Don Pedro put his ear to Bell machines
and then yelled excitedly, "Hey, it talks!"
A famous scientist named William Thompson
who was visiting from England, tried it out too.
Quote, "It does speak.
It is the most wonderful thing I've seen in America."
Bell recounted the events as follows.
"I went to bed the night before an unknown man
and awoke to find myself famous.
I owe it to Sir William Thompson,
back of him to Don Pedro,
and back of him to the deaf students of Boston."
After that success, Mabel suggested that Bell go
on a series of telephone demonstrations across the country.
She also insisted that he should
stop calling himself A. Graham Bell
and instead presented under his full name,
Alexander Graham Bell, saying, "No A for me,"
which is why he is known by his full name even today.
This was a romantic time for the couple.
When they got together, they would stay out late.
And Mabel wrote a letter to her mother.
Quote, "Mama, dear, please don't scold us.
We really couldn't help it. We were talking.
So we had to stop under every lamppost
so I could see what Alec had to say."
In July of 1877, Bell and Hubbard
founded the Bell Telephone Company, which is now AT&T
and Alec and Mabel got married two days later.
They were happily married for 55 years.
At his deathbed, she whispered, "Don't leave me,"
to which he signed, "No,"
but fell into unconsciousness and died soon after.
Mabel was devastated.
Her daughter said that, quote,
"You never forget for a moment that the heart of everything
had gone out of life for her forever."
Mabel died the next year.
In the 1870s and 80s, only the very rich and powerful
had the money to use a telephone.
What really changed things,
what started the electrical revolution was electric light
and the electrifying whole cities to provide that light.
How Thomas Edison willed a light bulb empire into existence
is next time on "The Secret History of Electricity."
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
- Thanks for watching my video.
Please remember to give it a nice thumbs
and check out the next one about Edison and the light bulb.
It should be a good one.
And don't worry if you're a fan of Tesla.
The video after that is going to be
about Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.
Have a good day.
(upbeat lounge music)