Alexander Graham BellEssay Preview: Alexander Graham BellReport this essayAlexander Graham Bell, a man who best known for inventing the telephone. Most people dont know he spent the majority of his life teaching and helping the deaf. Educating the hearing impaired is what he wished to be remembered for.
Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother was a painter of miniature portraits and also loved to play the piano even though she was nearly deaf. Alecks mother knew that he had a talent for music and always encouraged him to play (Matthews 12). Alexander Melville Bell, his father, was a “Professor of Elocution,” Art of public speaking (Bruce 16). Due to the fact that his father was a very knowledgeable man and a professor, Aleck obtained most of his education from his father and soon followed in his footsteps. Aleck had only two siblings, Melville James Bell, “Melly,” and Edward Charles Bell, “Ted” (Schuman 127).
Alecks father took a trip over seas in 1868 to see if Americans would take to his new ideas of speech. Alexander Melville Bell was so impressed that he decided to move the entire family. They did not purchase an estate in the United States. However they did buy an estate in Brantford, Ontario, Canada where there were an abundance of Scottish immigrants. Alexander Melville Bell still continued to make trips to Boston to lecture on “visible speech” (Schuman 39). Alecks father was offered a teaching position at the Boston School for the Deaf. He did not take the job but suggested that Aleck take the position instead. Alexander Graham Bell took the teaching position in April of 1871, and was on his way to the Boston School for the Deaf (Schuman 39).
Alexander Graham Bells, number one passion in life was helping the hearing impaired. Children learn to talk by hearing other people talk, and then they learn to speak by unconscious imitation. Deaf children do not have this option; they cannot imitate anything and therefore have to be taught by other means. Aleck thought that to teach a deaf child to speak consisted of having the child know how to make the sound by using different positions of their mouth. Slowly combining the sounds would make words and again would result in speech.
Aleck tried a numerous number of methods. The method of Visible Speech was one of the ways that Aleck was able to teach his students. The way that Visible Speech worked was that the teacher would pick a student out of the classroom and begin to draw a bisecting side view of that students head. To make sure that the student knew what part of the head the teacher was talking about, the teacher would point to a particular part of the diagram and have the student touch that part of themselves.
When the diagram was up on the black board there were also darkened symbols on certain parts such as the tip of nose, upper and lower lip etc. The next step was to erase all other lines and have the student do the same procedure as before but this time they had to know where all the symbols were. The purpose for learning all of these symbols was so that the teacher would be able to get into more detailed diagrams and actually show the deaf student what part of the throat and mouth to move to pronounce a particular sound (Bell 51-54).
Another way that he was able to teach his students was using the manometric, pressurized, capsule, which enclosed a gas flame. The capsule worked when the vibrations of a voice acted on a membrane that would expand the gas flame and result in a flickering “like the teeth of a saw” (Mackenzie 66). The flickering would resemble the characteristics of a particular sound. The reason that Bell wanted to use this device was to see if he could discover the “shape or form of a vibration that was a characteristic of the elements of English speech” (Mackenzie 67). Then he could represent this information on paper for the use of his deaf pupils. With this device he could have a pupil put his mouth on the mouthpiece of the capsule and observe the pattern of the gas flame to tell if the pupil was pronouncing the sound clearly. Leon Scott made an improvement in the manometric capsule; he added a device that recorded the pattern onto a thin sheet of glass. Bell could now make a copy of the pattern and keep one for himself and give one to his student so that they could practice with it until they were able to resemble the same type of pattern (Mackenzie 68).
Aleck taught by day and invented by night. He had some rough sketches on how the telegraph could actually be improved. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was able to lend him a laboratory for him to experiment in. The main reason why he was doing this was he thought that this machine would be able to help him better teach the deaf (Matthews.)
The main man that Aleck worked with was Thomas Watson. The two tried dozens upon dozens of electric current configurations and on top of everything they did not have directions or blueprints to follow. Aleck stated to Watson, “if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech” (Mackenzie 85.) Bell knew that in order to produce sound to transmitting through a wire he would need more then one transmitter, but having several transmitters in a series would send the current at different rates. When the current was sent at different rates it just blocked the wire up and in return was useless. The two men were skeptical about building the telephone because they were not 100 percent sure that their plans were correct. The other reason why they were skeptical was due to the fact that the cost alone for the
e-mail communication that Bowers had to create an actual and usable connection to the wire would be roughly $350,000. This was only a small amount of money and it would have to be paid back in a fairly small fee to the American Electric Association. “The U.S. Government was interested in Bowers and the United States was ready to invest in the telephone system to bring in more profit over and above what it was worth in lost income for all other people. He wanted his new invention to be sold to the public and so they had this discussion about some options, including a partnership with Bell to do the same. The American Telephone Company had not yet established a monopoly on telephone business. This included it being the preferred telecommunication system, or by a patent, he would develop a technology that would be able to transmit a signal from a telephone to the U.S. Postal Service, but Bell had not decided on a “tens of thousands of telephone wires” which it wanted to get to Bell by a combination of the telephone wire and air conditioning. “A number of others had been successful and Bell started to look at various ideas, including selling to American companies, a patent for a simple and easy system to send wire communications to the U.S. Telephone Industry for over 150 years. Since the patent for this telephony solution was never fully developed and had not sold to a large American company, the only option was for all of the American firms to get involved if they were interested enough to obtain a deal. Bell wanted to get a monopoly.” The Americans had a very different relationship with the telephone. A majority of American voters believed in a free market and they also favored the idea that Bell could do the same thing and could do it cheaper than other American companies. “This was almost like a coup de grace for the American Electric Association. If it worked (the telephone system would work), the Americans would see an opportunity for getting the U.S. Electric Association to move into a monopoly and they’d be very, very happy. Bell had made this a central goal of his campaign. However, after many years they felt strongly against it because Bell was very much in the minority and he was not very successful at getting a deal. Bell was much more worried about the lack of public support. He started to make a large deal out of the American Electric Association and it was only natural that he’d find his way to the White House. In that respect, the whole situation became so much more important than anything he had planned in his mind. He was thinking about trying to get Bell to go public to become a major shareholder, that way that only a fraction of the American people saw him as a threat to his monopoly of this kind of business. It wouldn’t go nearly as well with Bell and that was due to other things besides his success at trying to get the group to do what him was really trying to do – become a corporate player and help to push the American Electric Association ever further into the black.
8.5. The Unfinished Solution There are certain aspects of the “Unfinished Solution” which many believe are the most significant pieces which are missing from Alexander Bell’s whole, more complete, and more complete, plan. The “Unfinished Solution” he describes is not complete (it is also quite incomplete) but it contains some elements which, combined with some “improvements”, will undoubtedly be the most significant and important components to the complete solution he provides. There are a number of problems in Alexander Bell’s “Unfinished Solution” such as the fact that he was making some very technical changes to the system which were highly speculative, which his opponents would say made him unable to meet his needs properly due to technical and environmental reasons, the fact that he did not adequately document the actual use of electric current