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. Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Pans Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan 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, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior 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.