Inventors: Alexander Graham Bell

1847–1922, American scientist, inventor of the telephone, b. Edinburgh, Scotland, educated at the Univ. of Edinburgh and University College, London; son of Alexander Melville Bell. He worked in London with his father, whose system of visible speech he used in teaching the deaf to talk. In 1870 he went to Canada, and in 1871 he lectured, chiefly to teachers of the deaf, in Boston and other cities. During the next few years he conducted his own school of vocal physiology in Boston, lectured at Boston Univ., and worked on his inventions. His teaching methods were of lasting value in the improvement of education for the deaf.

At the Centennial Exposition in 1876, Bell's telephone is unveiled. Competition is a powerful catalyst for Edison. In mere months, he turned the telephone into a commercially viable device. Distributed by PBS Distribution.

In the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell was trying to improve the telegraph when he and his assistant discovered that speech itself could be transmitted over telegraph wires. Explore the subsequent engineering developments that brought the telephone to almost all households, including Bell's invention of twisted-pair cabling to reduce crosstalk, still in use today.

In the US, the question on who invented the telephone has a widely known answer with more than one hundred and thirty years after the event when Alexander Graham Bell and Watson's first telephone call remains a classroom staple: a standard device for teaching Americans about the nation's inventive past, and even for placing technological change at the center of mainstream history. Bell routinely ranks among the hundred greatest or most influential Americans, whether chosen by historians or internet polls. Here, Beauchamp explains the importance of the question to the early history of the telephone--and hence ultimately to Bell's place in American memory.

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis of invention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental models and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius.