- Graham Bell made history with his patent application for the telephone, but was the Scottish inventor really the inventor of this device?
What are Graham Bell’s origins?
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847 (he died in Beinn Bhreagh, Canada, on August 2, 1922) into a family dedicated to speech and pronunciation correction, an interest stemming from the fact that both his maternal grandmother and his mother were deaf.
The presence of this type of sensory functional diversity in his immediate environment led Graham Bell’s father to study and publish numerous research papers on the subject, even devising a speech technique called “Visible Speech,” a system that sought to help people with hearing impairments visualize sounds so that they could subsequently improve their pronunciation.
In addition to his interest in issues related to sound, he also had an innovative streak, as at the age of 12 he built a machine for husking wheat for a neighbor of the family.
At the age of 16, he was already an assistant teacher of speech and music in Scotland, before his family moved to London in 1865, where he worked in a school for deaf people until, for health reasons, the family moved again, this time to Canada. It was 1870.
Who patented the telephone in 1876?
Once settled on the other side of the pond, on March 7, 1876, Bell patented the telephone three days before making the famous call to his assistant: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
Specifically, patent 174,465 was issued on March 7, 1876, after being filed on February 14 of that same year. As we will see later, the recognition of who invented the telephone was not without controversy.
But neither was the filing of the patent, since on that same February 14, 1876, although a few hours later than Bell, another inventor named Elisha Gray had filed his patent notice for a prototype telephone with a liquid transmitter.
After a legal battle, Gray lost the rights to the invention of the telephone, although his career as an inventor left other advances for history, such as the “Musical Telegraph,” one of the first electric synthesizers that transmitted musical tones via telegraph lines.
Controversy aside, the enormous success and popularization of Bell’s patent skyrocketed his profile, turning this device into a means of mass communication with the founding in 1877 of the Bell Telephone Company, a company that, after mergers and modifications, is the seed of today’s AT&T, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.
Who really invented the telephone?
The fact that Graham Bell patented and popularized it undoubtedly had enormous relevance in the history of the telephone.
However, in 2002, in its resolution 269, the Official Bulletin of the United States Congress recognized the Italian Antonio Meucci as the legitimate inventor of the telephone on the premise that “if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the reservation after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell,“ adding that ”it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized,“ as well as ”his work in the invention of the telephone.”
In 1854, Meucci had invented a device—the “teletrofono”—with which he communicated from his home office to the bedroom where his wife was bedridden, a victim of rheumatism.
The inventor’s inability to patent this invention was due to various misfortunes, as well as a lack of financial resources, as was proven in 2002, as we explained earlier. Although he fought for this recognition during his lifetime, as we have just mentioned, it came posthumously, 113 years after his death.
What did Bell invent? Photophone and graphophone
Other innovative devices bearing Graham Bell’s stamp were the photophone and the graphophone.
The former was invented in 1880 together with Charles Sumner Tainter and was Bell’s most important achievement. It was a device that allowed sound to be transmitted by means of light emission and is considered an important part of the subsequent development of the history of fiber optics.
Although the photophone was never implemented due to technical limitations, it served to demonstrate the feasibility of voice transmission using light.
Together with Sumner Tainter, they also developed the graphophone—which was not the same as the gramophone—an improvement on Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph.
This graphophone was a device that recorded and reproduced sound using wax cylinders that were more durable and of higher quality than the aluminum foil used in the phonograph.
Graham Bell, co-founder and second president of National Geographic
As a curiosity, we could add that Bell was one of the founders of National Geographic in 1888, even presiding over this society responsible for publishing the iconic magazine between 1898 and 1915, as the second president of the entity, a position previously held since its foundation by his father-in-law, Gardiner Green Hubbard.
Frequently asked questions
Graham Bell was born in the Scottish city of Edinburgh on March 3, 1847.
He died in Beinn Bhreagh, Canada, on August 2, 1922.
On March 7, 1876, Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, although for decades there was controversy over whether he was really the inventor.
March 7, 2026 marks the 150th anniversary, as it was on that day in 1876.
Because his mother and grandmother were deaf.
In addition to patenting the telephone, Graham Bell was noted for inventing other voice-related devices such as the phonograph and the graphophone.
This society, publisher of the famous magazine of the same name, was founded by 33 scientists in 1888, one of whom was Alexander Graham Bell, who served as president of the institution from 1898 to 1915.
