Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the Telephone) Research

Bell had long been fascinated by the idea of transmitting speech and by 1875 had come up with a simple receiver that could turn electricity into sound; “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in density during the production of sound, I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.” Others were working along the same lines, including an Italian-American Antonio Meucci, and debate continues as to who should be credited with inventing the telephone. However, Bell was granted a patent for the telephone on 7th March 1876 and it developed quickly. Within a year the first telephone exchange was built in Connecticut and the Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, with Bell the owner of a third of the shares, quickly making him a wealthy man.

The telephone has made communication more efficient and faster since it was first developed. There is no doubt that it has made a dramatic impact on writing and teaching. In some respects it has moved us back to the oral culture that we originated from and in other respects it has aided in the proliferation of the written text. The telephone has transformed society’s social behaviour by changing the way we communicate with each other. The telephone has fostered a whole host of new inventions, both the cellular phone and the internet are a result of the telephone system. We can now read up on an obscure subject over the internet and then phone a friend immediately to discuss it. Ursula Franklin claims technology is more than the sum of its wheels, gears, transmitters.  It is a system that involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations and most of all, a mind-set (Franklin, 1999). The telephone is prime example of what Franklin was referring to. Just as writing changed our thought processes the telephone has also changed our mind-set to a more complex way of thinking and continues to impact us as we move into the twenty-first century. Mark Twain seemed to have summed up our love hate relationship with the telephone through his following quote.

"The human voice carries too far as it is.. and now you fellows come along and seek to complicate matters..."-Mark Twain on the invention of the telephone.