No telephone history would be complete without a brief biography of the telephone's inventor. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, came from an English family deeply involved in speech and elocution. As a young man, Bell traveled from England to Boston where he earned his living teaching speech to the deaf. In Boston he became friends of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer, and Thomas Sanders, a wealthy leather merchant, the fathers of two of his students. These two men became his financial backers when he began experimenting with the telephone and the harmonic telegraph. His backers particularly wanted him to invent a harmonic telegraph, a device that distinguishes musical notes, and makes it possible to transmit more than one message at a time across telegraph wires.
In 1874 at the age of twenty-seven he became convinced that he could transmit any sort of sounds if he could only vary the intensity of the current exactly like the current of air varies when the sound is made. To help with the mechanical aspect of his endeavors, he enlisted the assistance of electrician Thomas A. Watson. They rented a room in a boarding house and went to work.
By the spring of 1875 he had made no progress on the harmonic telegraph. He knew that he was racing with a Western Union electrician, Elisha Gray, who also was trying to develop the telephone. Seeking assistance, Bell went to Joseph Henry, the inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph. Henry was extremely interested in Bell 's ideas concerning the telephone and urged him to devote his time to developing it rather than the harmonic telegraph. Subsequently, Bell decided to cancel his teaching classes and devote himself solely to working on the telephone. His backers, Hubbard in particular, were upset. They had no faith in Bell 's telephone and were only interested in the telegraph. By this time Bell and Hubbard's daughter Mabel were engaged, and Hubbard threatened Bell with separation from Mabel if he failed to work on the telegraph.
Bell continued to work on the telephone. Then on June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson finally managed to transmit the sound of plucked string. Encouraged, he and Watson worked fervently on the project. Bell filed a patent for the device in Washington, D.C. on Valentine's Day, 1876. Patent number 174,465 was issued to him on March 7, 1876. The patent made no mention of the telephone - in fact, it was titled "improvements in telegraphy." It described two methods of transmission, the magneto-induction method, which was later realized as impractical, and the variable resistance method upon which the modern telephone is based. At the time of his filing, Bell had actually experimented only with the magneto-induction method, mentioning his claim to variable resistance in a paragraph in the margin of the patent. The same day that Bell 's patent was filed, Elisha Gray filed a caveat warning other inventors about the telephone. At the time, however, neither Bell nor Gray had actually transmitted speech electrically.
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