Changes and advances in the telecommunications industry are a daily occurrence. Companies that were household names yesterday are no longer in existence today. New companies, with names that can hardly be spelled, and certainly can’t be pronounced, suddenly are the latest and greatest.

Features and capabilities that couldn’t even be dreamed of a decade ago are now quite common place. More are appearing in the marketplace every day.

These changes and these advances didn’t just happen; they were developed and nurtured by people. People who were pioneers, in fact, giants, in our industry. This series introduces you to these telecom giants. What sort of people were they? What did they do? What were the obstacles they encountered and how did they overcome them? Finally, what were the results and the rewards?

Alexander Graham Bell
On the morning of February 14, 1876, a patent was filed at the Patent Office in Washington D.C. A few hours later that same day Elisha Gray came to the same Patent Office and filed a document that amounted to the same thing. Bell’s claim to the invention rests on those few hours, but it rests solidly, and has withstood thousands of law suits and challenges.

Patent No. 174,465 was allowed on March 3, 1876, and issued on March 7. It was entitled “Improvements in Telegraphy,” and did not so much as mention the word telephone. It described two general methods of transmission: one by induction caused by placing a membrane near an electromagnet, the so-called magneto-induction principle (an ill-fated approach that soon disappeared entirely from the annals of telephony), and the second by causing speech to bring about varying electrical resistance in a circuit. This method (described below) was vastly superior, and became the principal behind all non-electronic transmitters.

Most of the patent application pertained to the magneto-induction principal; the variable resistance principal was simply hand-written into the margin of the document. And, prior to the application, no experiments had been conducted regarding this principal.

It didn’t take long, however, for Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson, to remedy that. Back in their Boston shop at 5 Exeter Place the two succeeded in producing a working model of a telephone. The historic words “Mr. Watson! Come here; I want you!” would go down as the first spoken communications over an electrical circuit. The day was March 10, 1876.

Just who was this man who invented one of the most important devices in history? An engineer? A scientist? No, not at all. He was a man interested in sounds, primarily speaking and hearing. This came rather naturally, inasmuch as his grandfather was a Shakespearean actor, and his father, Melville Bell, was a distinguished teacher of elocution at the University of Edinburgh. Graham, as he liked to be called, taught music and elocution at a school near Edinburgh, and assisted his father by delivering lectures on what was called visible speech and by studying the anatomy of the vocal apparatus at University College, London. In 1870 the Bell family moved to Brantford, Canada, a small industrial town some 30 miles north of the shore of Lake Erie and 60 miles west of Niagara Falls. Shortly after that Graham began work on a device that could be applied to the telegraphy business; he called it a harmonic telegraph. The hope was that different tones could be transmitted down the telegraph wire, each of which would be keyed by the telegraph. At the distant end the tones would be separated. The goal, of course, was to be able to transmit several messages simultaneously on a single wire. Certainly such a device would have tremendous commercial applications – but such a goal was not enough for young Graham.

He had learned, in his studies, that if the resistance of a wire could be varied, the current in the wire could be varied. And if, at one end of a wire a voice-activated device could be implemented that would vary the resistance of a current-carrying wire, and at the other end of the wire a diaphragm could be vibrated by this varying current, then sounds, or words, spoken into the transmitting end could be reproduced at the receiving end.

And this was the principal of the telephone! Somehow put a device in an electrical circuit whose resistance would be varied by the spoken voice. At some distant point let the current in the wire bias a diaphragm. As the current in the wire varied, so also did the position of the diaphragm. And the result was sound.

Bell’s approach to varying the resistance of a wire was to dip one end of it into a conductive liquid. If the wire were dipped in deeply, then the overall resistance of the wire and the liquid would be lessened; if the wire were dipped in only a little, then the resistance of the wire/liquid combination would not be lessened.

But what liquid should he use? He tried water (no sound), cod liver oil (no sound), salt water (loud sound), liquor (loud sound), and a mixture of water and sulphuric acid. It was this last that worked best.

It was also the sulphuric acid that caused the situation that lead to the working model. Bell accidentally spilled a cup of acid over his clothes, and screamed into the mouthpiece, “Mr. Watson! Come here; I want you!”