Serendipitous Acid

Alexander was about to completely change the world.

No, not that Alexander. This was March 10, 1876, and Alexander Graham Bell was working in his lab, conducting experiments with his newly invented device. Meanwhile, Thomas Watson was busily working on his own lab tasks in another room.

Bell’s lab was a very frenetic place, full of energy and ideas. Unlike Edison’s Menlo Park, the lab was small and crowded. There were always little experiments running, sometimes several at a time, and it was easy to lose track of time there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bell spilled some acid he was working with in a specific experiment, and he needed to clean it up, and fast. The only problem was that one of those experiments he was running needed silence—a shout from a human voice would surely destroy the delicate work done so far.

Out of other options, Bell tried the one thing that could maybe, conceivably work. He spoke into the little funnel of the device he was working on.

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

Stunningly, just a second or two later, Watson came running in to Bell’s lab. He had heard every word.

For the first time in human history, human speech could carry across a significant distance, and it could sound like human speech at the other end.

Now, some of these details might be a little hazy, like the acid spill itself—Bell sometimes included this detail, but it’s totally possible that there wasn’t an acid spill that triggered the desperation. We’ll have to wonder about those specifics for now.

The one thing that’s certain, though, is that from this point forward, the world became increasingly smaller.

Even today, this kind of seems like magic. I grew up in an era where you could make landline-based local phone calls for free from your home phone, and long distance calling was expensive, but very reliable. Being able to speak in real time with my relatives living in Taiwan, for instance, was mind-blowing if I stopped and thought about it. I was speaking in real time (technically, almost real time) to someone on the other side of the planet.

How did Bell’s device work, though? How did that landline magic happen?

The process began when Bell spoke into the experimental device, shooting sound waves from his voice into the funnel. These sound waves bombarded a diaphragm—a thin piece of metal inside designed to catch them—and these waves caused the minuscule metal to vibrate.

Bell knew all about Michael Farraday’s famous finding, that moving a magnet back and forth along a wire would induce an electrical current. This little back-and-forth movement (oscillation) caused by the vibration sent electrical oscillations down the wire.

At the other end, Watson had the receiver, which also had a diaphragm. The electrical waves going through the wire would cause the thin metal to vibrate, creating sound once again.

I really like to stop and think about this.

You hear a voice at the other end of the telephone line, but it’s pretty wild to remember that you’re hearing something that has been translated twice, in a way. The electrical pulses that are so convenient for transmitting a signal mean nothing to our ears, and that’s what’s travelling all those distances, not the sound itself.

Today, we translate sound a step further by converting the electrical signal to binary code (digital), so that instead of electrical waves traveling, we have pulses of light that represent ones and zeros. I think that’s something to talk about another day, though. It’s another really fascinating story, and it involves what Bell’s lab evolved into.

The world was turned upside down on March 10, 1876, and we’ve never looked back. Instantaneous communication is taken for granted all over the world. Eight out of nine humans alive today has a phone. Try to imagine how much more connected we are than 150 years ago.

Help me think a little today: how would you rank the invention of the telephone against every other invention? Does it crack the top ten for you?