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A bronze medal is nailed to the door of 109 Court Road in Boston, USA, with two lines engraved on it: "the telephone was born here on June 2, 1875."

Many people know that the telephone was invented by Bell, or rather, Bell was one of the inventors of the telephone, and he was the first to patent the invention. However, most people do not know that Bell is neither a mechanic nor an electrical engineer. After the invention of the telephone, people often called him the inventor of the telephone, but he regarded himself as a "teacher of the deaf". He always regarded "making people speak" as his lifelong goal, and put the achievements in this area first. It was in order to achieve this goal that he embarked on the road of inventing the telephone. Bell's dream of "making people talk" has something to do with his experience.

Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. Three generations of his family are related to "making people open their mouths". My grandfather worked all his life in educating the deaf-mute; his father was a physiologist who studied phonetics and focused on the principle of human voice. His family often gathered a group of people with voice disabilities, and his father used his knowledge and love to educate them and help them speak. After my grandfather died, my father inherited his grandfather's will. In addition to educating the deaf-mute, he also studied the mechanisms and methods of speaking and pronunciation. Bell's mother is deaf and has a special influence on Bell. She does not feel inferior because of her own defects. She is not only good at socializing and children's education, but also can play the piano well. Since childhood, Bell understands the difficulties of his mother, and is eager to tap his potential as much as possible in his mother's persistence and intelligence, and enter a situation beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Bell was most impressed by his mother's experience, which made him consistently help deaf people in the teaching process of the deaf-mute in the future. this is the root of the invention of the telephone, which most people can't experience.

Bell's father invented the method of pronunciation to teach the deaf-mute to speak, and Bell wanted to build a machine to help the deaf speak. He was fascinated by the idea, but he couldn't find his way. At the age of 19, he wrote to Alexander Iris (Alexander Ellis), a linguistics expert, about what he wanted to do. Iris told him that what he was going to do was similar to that of German physicist Herman Helmholtz, who had achieved it. Bell found Helmholtz's book, but he could not read German and could only understand it according to the illustrations and his imagination. In the end, he misunderstood the meaning of the pictures, mistakenly thinking that Helmholtz's device could transmit the sound of speech by electric current. In fact, Helmholtz devices can only transmit "vowels" rather than language.

At this time, Bell was suffering from tuberculosis, and his physical and mental distress almost brought him to the brink of collapse. For the sake of his son's health, the father decided to move the family to Canada, to a place with better air and environment. In 1870, they settled in Bradford, Ontario. This is a livable place with fresh air. Bell gradually regained his health. Soon, he discovered that there were six national nature reserves nearby, inhabited by Mohawk-speaking aborigines. With an obsession with language and an interest in knowledge, Bell soon learned the language of the local aborigines. Mohawk has a unique pronunciation and simple language. It is an oral language handed down from generation to generation, but it has no words and cannot be written. Bell tried to convert the words of Mohawk which could not be written into phonetic symbols, and finally made it possible for Mohawk to write and express. To celebrate the invention, local aborigines held a bonfire party, danced traditional dance steps and awarded Bell the title of "Honorary Elder". The experience of inventing phonetic symbols for Mohawk created conditions for him to create a "visible sound" for English in the future, and laid the foundation for the invention of the telephone.

In 1872, Bell was invited to the United States. He runs a school for the deaf in Boston. Two years later, Bell inherited the career of his ancestors and became a third-generation linguistics teacher. He further perfected his father's invention, the phonetic alphabet (phonetic alphabet). His past experience in inventing phonetic symbols for Mohawk enabled him to quickly create an English of "visible sound". It consists of 30 symbols, each of which represents a different position of lips, teeth, tongue and the method of breathing. As long as you see the symbol, you can make a sound even if you can't hear it. Gradually, the deaf can speak according to these symbols. This achievement attracted the attention of a rich businessman. He had a deaf-mute daughter, Mabel, and Bell taught Mabel to speak in this way. Bell and Mabel became husband and wife after falling in love on July 11, 1877. In this way, Bell not only successfully studied the teaching method of making the deaf-mute "open his mouth", but also married a deaf wife, and Mabel became the pillar of Bell's career.

In 1874, at the age of 26, Bell was appointed professor of linguistics and physiology and acoustics at Boston University. At the same time, Bell continued to work on devices that transmit sound. That year, Boston opened its first power line, connecting the factory of Charles Williams, the big factory owner, to his private home in Somerville. Using Morse code, the situation of the factory is constantly transmitted to the factory owner, and the order of the factory owner is also transmitted to the manufacturer in this way. Seeing this aroused Bell's dream: since wires can transmit passwords, why can't they transmit sound? Isn't the voice of a person also a kind of fluctuation? The idea that he wanted electricity to vibrate like people spoke excited him and was quickly supported by two rich people, Gardiner Hubbard, a lawyer and financier, and Thomas Sanders, a wealthy businessman.

The invention of the Bell telephone happened by accident. It was caused by a Reed. One day in June 1875, Bell and his assistant Watson were doing an experiment in the basement. He and his assistant are in two adjoining rooms. They want to imitate the password of the Telegraph and use electricity to transmit sound. Watson taps the sound with a metal plate, turns it into a strong or weak current, and transmits it to Bell's room. Bell then uses an electromagnet to turn the current into a sound receiver. From the current point of view, the principle of this experiment is very simple, but they always fail to achieve the desired results.

One day while he was doing an experiment, one of Watson's reeds was stuck by a magnet. He subconsciously played the Reed with his fingers. The Reed vibrated quickly, making a special "buzzing" sound. Watson suddenly saw Bell rush in and shouted, "what did you just do? do it again!" They found that when the Reed of the transmitter was bounced, the sound made could be received by the receiver. Try it again and again, but it works all the time. This is a key phenomenon. According to this phenomenon, they transmit sounds of different sizes and heights from the transmitter to the receiver through a wire, and then turn these "vibrations" into the "vibrations" of various reeds, and the voice is indeed sent out. That's how the phone was born. It was June 2, 1875, and the original telephone was very crude, but it was the first telephone born in the world.

Bell drew the telephone design in 1876 when Bell was 28 and Watson was 21. After six months of revision and adjustment, on March 3, 1876, Bell applied for a patent for his invention of the telephone. On March 10, 1876, when Bell was doing an experiment, he accidentally spilled sulfuric acid on his leg and shouted to his companion, "Mr. Watson, come and help me!" Unexpectedly, this sentence was transmitted to another room through the telephone under experiment. it was the first voice transmitted by human beings over the telephone, so it went down in history.

In 1877, the third year of the invention of the telephone, Boston opened the first telephone line with the help of the original Morse code line. In the same year, the Boston Globe received a message over the phone for the first time. In 1878, Bell and Watson successfully completed a long-distance telephone experiment between Boston and New York, which is more than 300 kilometers apart.

A year after Bell made his first long-distance call to Watson in New York through a microphone in Boston, Bell made an international long-distance call to Paris in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. Since then, the world has entered the era of telephone, and telephone has become another revolution in the history of human communication.

The invention of the telephone made Bell a rich man. Instead of squandering the money, he expanded his own invention career on the one hand and helped other scientists complete their careers on the other. He funded Contemporary, the earliest American science magazine, poured money into National Geographic magazine, funded the construction of the Volt Lab, and continued to educate the deaf-mute. Among his students, there was Helen Keller, a deaf-mute who could neither see nor hear, and they also became closest friends when guiding her language communication.

Helen Keller and Alexander Bell in 1890, the Alexander Graham Bell Company he founded was for the deaf. In addition, he also participated in experiments to make iron lungs (a machine that can help patients breathe), helped Edison's phonograph to become commercial, invented hydrofoils, tetrahedral kites and silver darts and other aircraft. As a result, early aircraft experiments were carried out, as well as other aviation communication equipment.

In the summer of 1922, Bell died of diabetes at his home in Bretton, Nova Scotia, Canada. During Bell's farewell ceremony, phones in North America were shut down for one minute to pay tribute to the father of the phone.

Source: 365 days in the History of Science, slightly edited by: Wei Fengwen Wu Yi Editor: Zhang Runxin this article comes from the official account of Wechat: Origin Reading (ID:tupydread), author: Wei Fengwen, Wu Yi, Editor: Zhang Runxin

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