Alexander Graham Bell: Master of Sound #7 (14 page)
Read Alexander Graham Bell: Master of Sound #7 Online
Authors: Ann Hood
“We’re back,” Hadley said, disappointed. “I was having the loveliest conversation with Mr. Dickens.”
“What?” Felix demanded. “You met Charles Dickens? While I was getting myself knocked out…”
He paused.
His hand reached up to his face.
“My…my glasses,” Felix said. “They’re not broken.”
Maisie was staring at her slicker and rain boots.
“And I’m not in that beautiful dress,” she said.
“It’s as if we weren’t there at all,” Rayne added sadly.
“But we were, weren’t we?” Hadley asked.
“If it was a dream,” Rayne decided, “then it was the loveliest dream ever.”
Suddenly, the door to The Treasure Chest opened with a loud pop, and Great-Uncle Thorne marched in, waving a crowbar.
“How did you get in here?” he boomed. “One minute I’m feeling arthritic and tired, the next I have a bounce in my step.”
He stopped and looked hard at the Ziff twins.
“And who are you two?” he boomed even louder.
Felix grinned at Great-Uncle Thorne.
“These are Amy Pickworth’s great-great-grand daughters,” he said.
Great-Uncle Thorne’s face went pale. “But it can’t be,” he said.
“It’s true!” Maisie said. “Amy married young, and her husband died before their baby was even born.”
“Millicent,” he said softly, nodding his head. “She was not raised a Pickworth. After Amy got lost in the Congo, her dead husband’s family swooped in and took the child. No one ever saw or heard from her again.”
Rayne and Hadley were nodding too.
“Millicent was our great-grandmother,” Hadley said.
“My soul,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, his voice tender. “More Pickworths.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“So you all—” he began.
But he didn’t have to finish. It was obvious that they had indeed all time traveled.
“Where?” he asked them gently.
“We were with Alexander Graham Bell,” Maisie said.
Great-Uncle Thorne’s eyes drifted across the objects in the room, alighting on one and then another and then another still.
“Maybe I won’t seal the door again,” he said, more to himself than to them. “Maybe I’ll leave it open.”
Distracted, he wandered away without another word to the children.
Hadley grabbed Maisie’s arm.
“Our parents must be crazy with worry,” she said. “I just realized we’ve been gone forever!”
“No,” Felix told her. “Here, just a nanosecond has passed.”
She looked at him dubiously.
“Look,” he said, moving to the window. “It’s still raining, right? And we left the window open, right?”
“Yes,” Hadley said, considering.
“Well, there should be rain on the floor then, shouldn’t there? If we’ve been gone as long as you think.”
Hadley watched him as he swiped his hand across the floor.
“Practically dry,” he announced.
“The thing is,” Rayne said, “I want to go home and take a nice hot bath.”
Hadley chimed in, “I want to smell the fresh air and give my parents a hug. Even though that was the most exciting experience I’ve ever had, I’m glad to be home.”
“We have to leave home to appreciate it, I guess,” Maisie said, thinking of Aleck. That was what he had told them, and that was the thing that sent them back. And after a night in that workhouse and that rainy day spent on the streets of London, even the servants’ quarters sounded like a good enough home to Maisie.
“What have you two been up to?” Maisie and Felix’s mother asked them that night after they suggested they all watch a movie together, whichever one she wanted.
“Oh, the usual,” Maisie said.
“Yeah, just the usual,” Felix added.
Their mother gave them a long, hard look.
“Why do I not believe you?” she said finally.
They both shrugged.
“
Hmmm
,” she said. “Well, I’m going to take you up on your offer,” she said.
“Great,” Maisie said, meaning it.
“I’ll make the popcorn,” Felix volunteered. “I’ll even put Parmesan cheese on it, just the way you like it.”
“And I’ll get a big blanket so we can all cuddle together and be nice and warm,” Maisie said.
“Okay,” their mother said, still studying them.
“Elm Medona,” Felix said, “it feels like home.”
“Even upstairs will be nice,” Maisie added.
Their mother touched each of their foreheads.
“No fevers,” she said. “I guess I’ll just choose a movie and—”
“Anything but
Oliver!
” Maisie interrupted.
“Or
My Fair Lady
,” Felix said.
“But anything else is okay,” Maisie said.
“Okay,” their mother said. “Oh, could you please hang up your wet raincoats before you come upstairs?”
Their mother wandered off to set up the DVD player, and Maisie and Felix went to hang up their raincoats.
“What in the world?” Maisie said when something fell out of her slicker’s pocket.
Felix chased it across the floor and scooped it up.
“It looks like sea glass,” he said.
Maisie looked at the pale green piece of glass he held out to her.
“River glass,” she said.
She looked at her brother.
“It’s from the Thames,” she continued.
“You mean, it’s from the past?” Felix asked her.
Maisie nodded.
“I didn’t know we could take things back with us,” Felix said.
Maisie closed her fingers around the smooth piece of glass.
“I have a feeling,” she said, “that there’s a lot we don’t know about all of this.”
If Felix and Maisie had been paying closer attention, they would have heard Great-Uncle Thorne, who stood hidden in the shadows, laugh ever so softly. They would have heard him say, “That’s for certain.”
Alexander Graham Bell
March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922
A
lexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was named for both his father and grandfather. Both of his brothers had middle names, but he did not, so Aleck gave himself the middle name Graham when he was eleven years old. It was chosen to honor a close family friend.
His grandfather, uncle, and father were all elocutionists—teachers of speech—and his father’s book on lip-reading for the deaf is still used today. Aleck did public exhibitions with his father to demonstrate Visible Speech. But Aleck was also influenced by his mother’s deafness, which led him to study acoustics and sound.
Although he was a poor student, Aleck made his first invention when he was only twelve years old. One day, when he and his friend were playing in a grain mill, he watched the process of husking the wheat and decided it was too slow. Back at home, he built a device with rotating paddles that dehusked the wheat faster.
Soon after, his father took Aleck and his brother to see an automaton that simulated a human voice. Aleck was so impressed with what he saw that he convinced his older brother to help him build one of
their own. Their father bought the materials for them to construct an artificial larynx, lips, and tongue, and eventually they succeeded in building an automaton that could say “Mama” when they forced air into its windpipe.
Excited by this first experiment with sound, Aleck then “taught” the family Skye terrier, Trouve, to talk by manipulating its vocal cords and lips with his hands. Soon afterward, he grew more serious and began using tuning forks and other devices to test the various aspects of sound and its transmission.
When Aleck was fifteen, he was sent to London to live with his grandfather for one year. It is widely believed that the playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote his play
Pygmalion
based on Aleck’s grandfather’s elocution work.
Pygmalion
was turned into the musical
My Fair Lady
in 1956. After the year with his grandfather, Aleck returned to Scotland, where he, too, began to teach elocution. A few years later, he moved to England with the rest of his family. But in just three short years, both of his brothers died. With Aleck sickly, too, his father believed that Canada was a healthier place to live, so Aleck moved there with his parents.
Eventually, he moved to Boston and taught at Boston University, where he continued his experiments in sound. Often, he would stay up all night and then teach all the next day. Finally he decided to give up teaching and work on his experiments instead. However he took on two private students as a source of income. One of them, Mabel Hubbard, who had been deaf since she was five years old, became Aleck’s wife.
In 1864, telegraphs were one of the main forms of communication. The president of Western Union hired inventors Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to find a way to send multiple messages on each telegraph line. At that time, Aleck was working on a method of sending multiple tones on a telegraph wire using a multi-reed device to be able to send a human voice over the telegraph wire.
On June 2, 1875, Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, accidentally plucked one of the reeds. Bell heard the tones on his end of the wire, showing that multiple reeds were not necessary to transmit sound. Around the same time, Elisha Gray was experimenting with a water transmitter. On February 14, 1876, both Gray and Bell filed a patent for the first telephone, with
Bell beating Gray by allegedly just an hour. That short span of time made him the official inventor of the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell spent his life inventing new things. His discoveries led to the invention of the phonograph, the iron lung (which helped people who could not breathe on their own), and a device for locating icebergs. And he never gave up his experiments with sound. Bell considered trying to impress a magnetic field on a record as a means of reproducing sound, but he ultimately abandoned the idea. That idea is the principle behind tape recorders and hard drives on computers. He also invented an early form of air conditioning, experimented with composting toilets, and considered using solar panels for heat.
In 1881, President James Garfield was shot, and the bullet was stuck inside his body. Bell was called in to try to find it. Bell quickly devised the first metal detector, but the doctor would not move the president from his metal bed, making detection impossible.
Alexander Graham Bell died at the age of seventy-five. On the day of his funeral, every telephone in North America was silenced for one hour in his honor.
February 7, 1812–June 9, 1870
T
he British novelist Charles Dickens is the author of many beloved classics such as
Oliver Twist
, which was adapted into the musical
Oliver!
that debuted in London in 1960 and was made into a film in 1968;
David Copperfield
, which Dickens based on his own life and was his favorite of his own novels;
A Tale of Two Cities
, which many consider to have one of the finest first lines ever written (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”); and
A Christmas Carol
, which features the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, with the help of three ghosts, finds the Christmas spirit.
A Christmas Carol
has been adapted for radio, film, stage, and television, including an animated version,
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.
Quite an accomplishment for someone who had to leave school at the age of twelve and work in a shoe-polish factory to help support his family. His feelings of abandonment and betrayal of his parents became a major theme in his novels.
Alexander Graham Bell’s father did indeed read
from the works of Charles Dickens in Edinburgh. Dickens himself toured the United States as a lecturer and was so popular that he is sometimes considered the first modern celebrity, earning over a million dollars in current US dollars. But he got his inspiration from the streets of Victorian London. When he died, at the age of fifty-eight, he was buried at Westminster Abbey and his funeral was attended by thousands of people.
I do so much research for each book in The Treasure Chest series and discover so many cool facts that I can’t fit into every book. Here are some of my favorites from my research for
The Treasure Chest: #7 Alexander Graham Bell: Master of Sound.
Enjoy!
When I was twelve, like Maisie and Felix are in the book, no one had cell phones. Instead, every telephone looked pretty much the same. Usually black, they were very heavy and had a big rotary dial. To make a call, you had to put your finger in the dial and spin it. There was no call waiting, so if the person you were calling was already talking to someone else, you got a busy signal—a loud beeping sound. No one had answering machines. If someone called while you were out, there was no way for you to know they’d called!
Turn the page for other facts about the telephone, including one that might surprise you:
Did Alexander Graham Bell really invent the telephone?
On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was issued patent number 174,465 for an “improvement in telegraphy”—what became known as the telephone. Bell’s patent was the fifth one registered at the patent office that day. A short time later, Elisha Gray, an inventor from Illinois who was also experimenting with transmitting sound across a single wire, filed a patent for “transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically.” His was the thirty-ninth patent filed that day. The US Patent Office granted Bell’s patent for the telephone because it was filed first, and forever after Alexander Graham Bell has been known as the inventor of the telephone.
The same year that Alexander Graham Bell made his first telephone call, Heinz ketchup was founded.
Alexander Graham Bell thought we should answer the phone “Hoy! Hoy!” instead of “Hello!”
In 1880, there were nearly fifty thousand phones in the United States. In 1980, there were 103,000,000.
Although we are used to picking up a telephone and calling anywhere in the world, it took time for service between cities to begin. The first telephone service established was in 1881 between Boston and Providence, RI. Service between New York and Chicago began in 1892. In 1894, service between New York and Boston started. On April 11, 1891, service began between London and Paris. But transcontinental United States service did not begin until 1915. And the first transatlantic cable was not available until 1956.
In the beginning, there were no telephone numbers. Instead, operators memorized the names and lines of all the subscribers. But a measles outbreak in Lowell, Massachusetts, led to a concern that the operators might miss work, and no one would be able to use their telephone. That’s when the idea of telephone numbers was born.
The first telephone operators were actually young boys. Young boys had worked for low pay at telegraph offices, so everyone assumed they could easily work for telephone companies, too. But the boys didn’t have the discipline needed to do the job of telephone
operator. They made prank calls, grew impatient with the callers, and couldn’t memorize the names and coordinating lines of subscribers. In 1878, the first female telephone operators were hired in Boston. Their pleasant voices and strong work ethic—as well as the fact that they could be paid low wages—made women perfect for the job, and soon all operators were female. By 1910, New York Telephone employed 6,000 female operators. But the first male telephone operator was not hired until the early 1970s, almost one hundred years later.
Bell Telephone was started in 1878 by Alexander Graham Bell with father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and a man named Thomas Samuels. The success of that company, which became AT&T, had much to do with Bell’s future wife, Mabel Hubbard. Mabel thought Bell should show his invention at the 1876 US Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. But the exposition ran during Bell’s students’ exam period. So Mabel secretly bought him a ticket from Boston to Philadelphia, packed his suitcase, and took him to the train station, where she revealed her plan. When Bell started to argue with her, Mabel, who had been deaf
since she was five and relied on lip reading to “hear,” simply looked away from him. It worked. Bell went to Philadelphia and displayed his telephone, which at first was met with indifference. But when Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil entered the Education Building and watched Bell demonstrate the telephone, he is said to have shouted: “My God! It talks!”—capturing the attention of the other visitors. Soon, people were lining up to talk to Bell over his telephone, and he won the Gold Medal for Electrical Equipment.
The writer Mark Twain was one of the first people to have a telephone in his home.
Most early residential telephones’ numbers and lines were shared by two or more households. This was called a party line. The phone would ring in each house that shared that line. The conversation could be heard by everyone, and everyone could participate in it. Unique rings for each phone that shared a party line were developed to help with this. My aunt Angie had a party line even when I was a little girl. I used to love picking up her phone and eavesdropping on stranger’s conversations!
The first pay telephone was installed in 1889. Calls were made by inserting coins into slots. Pay phones were popular everywhere until cell phones made them obsolete. The idea for cell phones came to a man named D. H. Ring in 1947, but the technology to make them did not yet exist. The first cell phone call, between an employee of AT&T and an employee of Motorola, happened in 1973. Japan was the first country to have a mobile phone network, in 1979.
The phrase “Put them on hold,” actually comes from Bell handing Watson the telephone and saying, “Hold this,” while he went to do something else.
Remember the rotary dial on my childhood telephone? That was invented in the late 1890s by Almon Brown Strowger. The first push-button phone wasn’t invented until 1962. And today, there is one cell phone for every two people in the world. In the United States alone, there are more than three-hundred million cell phones.