The Story of Alexander Graham Bell

Bell’s Groundbreaking Invention

During the latter part of Bell’s Telegraph project, he decided to tell his future father-in-law, Gardiner Green Hubbard, who gave him the money he needed to complete his “multiple telegraphs.” Hubbard was interested in his project because he saw it as an opportunity to end the monopoly of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) with one of his inventions, ca. 1910. Bell engineered the first intelligible electronic transmission of voice and patented the telephone, and was a founding member and president of the National Geographic Society. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

By June 1875, Bell and Watson were certain that they would be successful with their goal of creating a telephone. Their experiments proved that different tones would create different currents in a wire. Their next agenda was to build a device with a membrane that could convert those tones to varying electric currents and a receiver to convert the varying currents back to human sounds at the other end.

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