![]() ![]() The Mohawk people made him an Honorary Chief. While living in America, he learned the Mohawk language and put it in writing for the first time. At 16, he began studying the mechanics of speech and also learned Greek and Latin. His father was a professor of speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh and his mother, despite being deaf, was an accomplished pianist.īell didn’t excel academically, but he was a problem-solver from an early age. They missed the boat.Īccording to, Bell’s interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf. Unfortunately for Western Union, the Bell Telephone Company had been launched by then. They knew if they could get the patent for $25 million, they would have a bargain. Two years later, in 1878, Western Union’s opinion had altered dramatically. They couldn’t see it being profitable, so they turned it down. Western Union ran America’s telegraph wires at the time, but its top people believed the telephone was just a fad. In 1876, Bell offered to sell the patent for his telephone to Western Union for $100,000. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialisation.”īell, who was born in Edinburgh in 1847, was certainly a determined character and made his invention work. He wants to improve whatever he sees and wants to benefit the world he is haunted by an idea. He said: “The inventor looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. My children didn’t get that much care and attention, and that’s because Mr Bell couldn’t just spend his days climbing trees and kicking a football like the other kids. In fact, I can’t move from one room to the other without tapping my pocket to make sure it’s there. That’s outside the time we spend talking on it. We check the time, the weather, our emails, texts, Whatsapp messages, news updates on Twitter and whatever. These days, we look at our phones about 85 times a day on average. The rest of the time it just sat there and minded its own business, and I don’t ever remember anyone sitting in front of it just staring at it, because that would have been pointless. We picked it up when it rang or when we wanted to make a call and that was it. When I was a child, our telephone sat on a table in the hall. He couldn’t possibly have predicted the extent though. That was at a time when I imagine getting a phone call was a rare event, so he must have had an inkling of how invasive his machine would eventually become. They say he refused to have a phone in his own study because he said it would only distract him from his work. It’s at times like that when I think we might have been better off if Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t bothered. A human who did nothing for me in the end, but that’s another story. I dialled the number, made the necessary selections, and then waited 93 minutes before speaking to a human. It had the incorrect date of the vaccination printed on it, and I couldn’t alter it online, so I had to use the phone number listed on the website. I experienced this recently, when I was trying to get my Covid Booster Certificate amended. For a start, he would find it difficult to contact Mr Watson’s office.Īfter dialling the number, he would have to listen to his options, select the one most suitable to him, make several more selections, before being advised that Mr Watson’s office was experiencing a large volume of calls and waiting time would be estimated in hours. If he were alive today, Mr Bell would notice some changes. He wasn’t surprised when Watson answered his call immediately and he probably assumed it would always be like that. ![]() I wonder, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, if he had any idea of how it would evolve? I doubt it, because his first words over his new invention were “Mr Watson, come here - I want to see you.” We’ve given up using ours because the only people calling it were scammers looking for our money, but these pests don’t have it all their own way either, because getting someone to answer a land-line is difficult these days. ![]()
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