Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections

145 Pages·1996·9.88 MB·English

by  Naomi Pasachoff

Alexander Graham Bell
Making Connections

Owen Gingerich
General Editor
Alexander Graham Bell
Making Connections
Naomi Pasachoff
Oxford University Press
New York • Oxford
To my daughters, Eloise and Deborah, whose birth dates
coincide with anniversaries of crucial events in the life of
Alexander Graham Bell: Eloise ("Here's the thing: I'm always on
the telephone"), February 27, 1975, a century after the formation
of the Bell Patent Association; and Deborah, May 8, 1977, 99
years after the birth of Bell's older daughter, Elsie.
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Copyright © 1996 by Naomi Pasachoff
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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permission of Oxford University Press.
Design: Design Oasis
Layout: Loraine Machlin
Picture research: Laura Kreiss
Library of Congress Cataloging-m-Publication Data
Pasachoff, Naomi E.
Alexander Graham Bell / Naomi Pasachoff
p. cm. — (Oxford Portraits in Science)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-509908-7 (library edition)
1. Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847-1822—Juvenile literature. 2. Inventors—United
States—Biography—Juvenile literature. [1. Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847-1922.
2. Inventors.] I. Title. II. Series.
TK6143.B4P38 1996
621.385'092—dc20 95-45024
CIP
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
On the cover A portrait of Alexander Graham Bell from ! 871: Inset: Bell making the first
telephone call between New York and Chicago in 1892.
Frontispiece: Bell descends the stairs of his tetrahedral tower. / 907.
Contents
Chapter I. "A Preparation for Scientific Work" 8
Sidebar: Electromagnetism: The Scientific
Principle Underlying the Telephone 20
Chapter 2. "Great Discoveries and Inventions. . .
Arise from the Observation of Little Things" 24
Sidebar: Sound, Speech, and Hearing 30
Chapter 3. "Onward Irresistibly in the Direction of the
Telephone" 40
Sidebar: How a Telephone Works 56
Chapter 4. "A Target for the World to Shoot At" 61
Chapter 5. "Science. . The Highest of All Things" 76
Sidebar: The "Photophone," Fiber Optics,
and Wireless Telephones 84
Chapter 6. "My Life Work. . .
The Teaching of Speech to the Deaf" 91
Chapter 7. "The Age of the Flying Machine
Was at Hand" 105
Chapter 8. "I Want Many More Years of Life
to Finish It All" 118
Chronology 133
Further Reading 136
Index 139
AUTHOR'S
NOTE
The titles of each of this book's chapters are quotations from
Alexander Graham Bell. Bell's lengthy association \vith the
National Geographic Society is reflected in several chapter
titles. Chapters 1, 3, and 6 are quotations from Bell's article
"Prehistoric Telephone Days," which appeared in the March
1922 issue of National Geographic Magazine. The titles of
chapters 2 and 7 also come from articles Bell wrote for
National Geographic, the former from "Discovery and
Invention," which appeared in the June 1914 issue, and the
latter from "Aerial Locomotion," which appeared in the
January 1907 issue.
Bell's devotion to his wife, Mabel, is reflected in the
remaining three chapter titles. The titles of chapters 4 and 8
come from letters Bell wrote to Mabel dated September 9,
1878, and February 8, 1885, respectively. Chapter 5 takes its
title from a remark of Bell's quoted in Mabel's diary entry
for March 8, 1879.
As Alexander Graham Bell: Making Connections neared
completion, an unexpected connection linking my own
spouse to Alexander Graham Bell and the National
Geographic Society came to my attention. My husband, Jay
M. Pasachoff, is an astronomer, one of whose research spe-
cialties is solar eclipses. For over two decades his research has
been partly supported by the National Geographic
Committee on Research and Exploration. In the April 1996
issue of National Geographic Magazine, in an article describing
the work of the committee, my husband's picture perform-
ing an experiment at a recent eclipse appears with this cap-
tion: "Beginning with Alexander Graham Bell's coverage of
a 1900 eclipse, the Society has sponsored space studies rang-
ing from the analysis of tiny asteroids to all-sky surveys."

CHAPTER
I
"A Preparation for
Scientific Work"
The thin, black-haired, whiskered young man, two days shy
of his 28th birthday, felt uncomfortable. It was not the bit-
ter cold of this March day in Washington, D.C., that under-
lay his mood. He, an aspiring inventor, was in the office of
78-year-old Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution. Henry was one of the best-known physicists in
the country and an expert in the still-young science of elec-
tricity. The Smithsonian, only a year older than the young
inventor, had been established by the United States
Congress in 1846 as a nonprofit research institution, and it
was the job of its secretary to direct its activities. The young
man waiting in his office had traveled from Boston to
Washington, where he planned to file a patent at the Patent
Office on an invention he was trying to perfect, the "har-
monic telegraph." He hoped his invention would be capa-
ble, when perfected, of sending many telegraph messages at
a single time. As he described his ideas, however, he could
sense the old man's lack of excitement.
Then the young man mentioned an electrical effect he
had noted in his work. When he passed electrical current
through a spiral of insulated copper wire and interrupted
8
Alexander Graham Bell in 1871, at the age of 24, when he was appointed professor of vocal physiology at Boston
University's School of Oratory.