Hello, this is Bruce Fummey. Today I'm going to make a video to summarise the life
of Alexander Graham Bell, and the debate about who really invented the telephone,
okay. You see in July 2020, the then President of the United States claimed that it was an American
that invented the telephone. Now in the same tweet, he seemed to claim that Americans split the atom,
won two world wars, and put Americans on the moon, but everyone knows that it was the Russians who broke
the German advance at Stalingrad. New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, won the Nobel prize for breaking
down atomic structure, and the moon landings were fake! I tell you what, do you know anyone that
actually believes that the moon landings were fake? Let me know in the comment section below.
Anyway, that leaves the question of the telephone. Before we Scots get all up ourselves about yet
another of our great inventions, it's probably not as straightforward as you think. If it were, there'd
be no controversy, and you and I would be wasting our time, and we're not. If you're interested in the
people, places and events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe button on the bottom
right hand side of the screen. In the meantime, let me settle the debate, by telling a story.
To set this controversy, we need to deal with two questions: one, who invented the
telephone, and two, were they American? So let me tell you about Alexander Graham Bell.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in this house at 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh on the
3rd of March 1847. Now the fact that somebody's engraved it on the wall shows that we are more
attached to it today than his parents were, because when he was only nine months old
the family moved round the corner to 13 Hope Street, which is where I'm going to take you now.
His mum was profoundly deaf, his dad was a teacher of the deaf. This is probably the
reason that young Alec was so obsessed by understanding sound, how it worked,
how it moved, and alternative methods by which it could be transmitted.
His grandad was a former actor and elocution teacher, who was living down in London.
His uncle was an elocution teacher too, so Alec was steeped in the world of sound and communication.
He was also steeped in innovation. His dad was developing a ground-breaking method for teaching
deaf people to speak, and he and his brothers were encouraged to be innovative in their own various
ways. One of the inventive things Alec did was an unusual job share with his brother. From the age of
13 to 18, young Alec taught in a school in Elgin, in return for getting more advanced classes himself,
and his brother went to Edinburgh University, at least for a while, and then the two boys
swapped, and they got their education like this alternating between Elgin
and Edinburgh on a rolling basis. Then in 1865 their grandad died and the family moved to London.
Did Alec stop being Scottish when he moved to London,
did he suddenly become English or was he just a Scotsman living in England? I suppose it
depends if you stay long enough to go native doesn't it? Apples and pears, apples and pears.
Pollution caused health problems for Alec and his two brothers. A couple years later
his younger brother died of TB (Tuberculosis), and Alec took a teaching job in Bath, where the air was cleaner,
but he was doing well as a teacher, and he came back to London to teach his dad's
visible speech system there. You see his dad had been developing a system of visible speech
to teach deaf folk to talk, in fact he was now crossing the Atlantic to promote it in North America,
but young Alec felt that he was doing fine in the UK, and he had no desire to emigrate.
Anyway, apparently the UK Government was taking teaching for the deaf more seriously.
Then his elder brother died, again of TB, and finally the one remaining Bell boy agreed to make
the move to Canada. Alec taught in various schools, and then he took on a private student called
George Sanders, who was profoundly deaf, and at the age of five had never spoken or attended school,
and so by day, Alec taught George, and by night he started investigating the possibility of sending
multiple telegraph signals over a single line, as you do. Turns out he was really good at both.
Now, the telegraph was a recent invention, and there was a drive to improve distance and capacity.
More interesting to Alec than the telegraph, was the idea of transmitting sound over a distance,
but Alec wasn't the only person taking an interest in that, two others, in particular. A guy
called Elisha Gray, who we'll meet again later, and was backed by the Western Union Telegraph Company,
and the mighty factory of inventions, that was the Thomas Edison Organisation.
David was in a fight with not one, but two Goliaths. What's worse, in 1874 he had a setback.
Alec filed a pending patent for his harmonic telegraph in the US
and the UK. Now this was a machine that would send musical tones down a wire, and a pending
patent, was a kind of interim patent that says I'm working on this and whilst I'm not quite finished,
I want to secure my rights to what I've done so far. Now it turns out that, not only could he not
file an application in the UK due to him being abroad, his application was rejected in the USA as well.
Alec was at a crossroads. He felt discouraged. Not only that, he had two competing pulls;
his parents were telling him to stop messing about with inventions and get on with the serious, proper,
income-producing job of teaching, but he also made a three-way business arrangement between himself
and the parents of two private students: the father of young George Sanders, who's a leather merchant
and the father of another child, and future wife, Gardiner Hubbard. He was a patent solicitor
or a Patent Attorney. Sometimes I have to be bilingual! Alec was torn between parents and
partners in a tug of war along a telegraph wire and nobody was getting the message!
This was the house that the Bells moved to when he was nine months old.
We're kind of past that now aren't we? I kind of feel like a Morse Code operater in a telephonic
world. Anyway now it seems to be a wine bar. Back home in Canada, in the summer of 1874, Alec was
reinvigorated. His teaching work, and some somewhat macabre experiments with a dead man's ear, meant that he'd
decided to concentrate on the transmission of the human voice. His Patent Solicitor, partner made
sure that he meticulously recorded everything he did, with dates, rationale and methodology.
In 1875, Bell hired a machinist assistant called Watson. On the 2nd of June, 1875,
he used a metal reed at one end of a wire, to send a tone along to the other end. On the 30th of June,
they used air pressure on a membrane to transmit speech. On the first of July, they tested the first
ever prototype telephone, and on the 14th of February, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent
for the first ever telephone. He filed the patent in the United States of America,
and this is where the first of our two questions comes in, because remember Elisha Gray? Well he
filed a patent application the very same day, only he filed his later in the day. Now the controversy
arose over the late additions to the patent made by Bell, and whether or not Bell was entitled to
know about similarities between his and Elisha Gray's apparatus, but Bell had three advantages:
one, he'd kept meticulous, dated notes, that allowed him to show exactly when he came up
with each stage of his invention, two, he'd filed earlier in the day, and he was therefore entitled
to review areas of similarity and competition in the two devices, and three, his competition hadn't
completed his apparatus, but was filing a caveat pending patent, the very type of patent the American
Patent Office had refused Bell for his harmonic telegraph two years earlier. The patent was awarded
to Alexander Graham Bell on the 7th of March, 1876 and on the 10th of March, Watson and Bell
constructed an apparatus, that would take the human voice, and transport it along a wire to be heard
in another room. Watson was the first person ever to hear a voice through a telephone wire. Bell said,
"Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you." Bell then heard Watson say, "Mr Bell, do you understand what
I say?" This happened at 5 Exeter Place, Salem, and they were both burned as witches! No, no, no, no. They weren't, they weren't, they weren't!
See this? Now we very seldom use these as a telephone,
most of the time, I use it as a television. I wonder what nationality invented that?!
You might want to watch my video on John Logie Baird. I'll leave a link at the end shall I?
Incidentally, I've also produced new products for my shop, right. I've got a merchandise
shop where you can buy things like this. It's at www.scotlandhistorytours.co.uk/shop
You can now buy mugs, t-shirts and hoodies with a picture of
Alexander Graham Bell and the caption 'If you want something invented, phone a Scotsman'. It's good eh?
Come back and click the white tab, or there'll be a link in the description below.
But back to America, and one thing we know about America is they love their courtroom
dramas don't they? Elisha Gray, Western Union, Alexander Graham Bell and the Bell Company
spent a long time in court, litigating about the first question that we asked at the start.
Who was really entitled to claim to be the first person to have patented the telephone?
After a long, arduous process, American courts decided
it was Alexander Graham Bell. Now I gave you three reasons earlier, but I just want to take a
moment to focus on one of them. Alexander Graham Bell filed a full patent, whereas Elisha Gray
only filed for a pending patent. Now the reason that Bell didn't file for one of these
interim type patents earlier, was that he'd been refused this type of patent before. The reason
that he was refused, was that interim patents in the US, could only be filed by Americans.
Not only did the American courts decide it was Alexander Graham Bell who invented the telephone,
but one of the reasons that the evidence was in his favour, was because he wasn't an American.
I'm sorry my American, friends you are now in the bronze position. Now whether he was Canadian or
Scottish, we'll come to, but we know for sure that the telephone wasn't invented by an American.
After the stresses of court cases, Alec decided to get away from America. Now he had money, he
could go where he wanted. Did he come back here to Scotland? No, he went to Nova Scotia. He bought some
land and settled down in the Bras d'Or Lakes. He went on to demonstrate an early prototype
of the helicopter. He'd invented the first ever air conditioning system, aerofoil ships, and loads
of other stuff that we don't have time for. He lived out his life and he died on August the 2nd
1922. He died in the arms of his wife, and of course previous student, who was also deaf. Unable
to speak himself at the end, the last words for the first man ever to speak into a telephone
were sign language to his deaf wife. Now just before I tell you whether Alec was Scottish or
Canadian at the end, normally people have joined up as patrons in the last week getting their name
in the end credits when the video finishes, however Fiona Ingram, who did become a patron
last week is vision impaired, so she wouldn't be able to see that, and I just wanted her to hear
her name so Fiona, huge thank you for becoming a patron, thanks for your support. I love you
The place that Alec Graham Bell died was the spot in Nova Scotia where he'd settled down. He called it
Beinn bhreagh, it's Gaelic for 'beautiful mountain'. Now I don't know if he chose a Gaelic name because
he felt Canadian, or because he felt Scottish, what I do know, is that Alexander Graham Bell was born
formed and motivated to investigate sound transmission by his experiences with his
deaf mother, in two houses, either side of Charlotte Square here in Edinburgh. That's in Scotland, oh and
in April the 17th 1982, Queen Elizabeth signed the Canadian Constitution Act, formalising the
constitutional arrangements for Canada, so Canada didn't really exist until 1982 anyway. I'll see the
angry Canadians in the comment section, along with the crazy people that think that people actually
landed on the moon, ha what are you like? In this video you'll learn about the life of another Scotsman,
who invented the television. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.