Alexander Graham Bell's March 10, 1876, notebook entry in which he recounts the famous first words spoken over the new telephone.
A scientific notebook in which Alexander Graham Bell recorded his invention of the telephone and the first words ever spoken by phone, as well as correspondence from his assistant, Thomas Watson, are among the last items added to an online collection of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers.
Consisting of 4,695 items, the collection is available on the American Memory Web site at memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/.
The project to digitize a selection of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers was completed in March. (See the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, April 1999, for an earlier story on the digitization of the Bell Papers.)
"The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers are among the most popular in the Library's Manuscript Division," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "He is synonymous with the dawning of a new era of communications, and the Library is pleased to make these papers available to a wide audience."
The digitization of the Bell Family Papers was made possible through the generous support of the AT&T Foundation.
The newly available letters, scientific notebooks, pamphlets and other materials date from 1871 to 1914. In the March 10, 1876, notebook entry, Bell recounts his utterance of the famous words—"Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you"— as well as his reaction when his assistant arrived: "To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said."
A letter from Bell to his future wife, Mabel Hubbard, from Oct. 5, 1875.
These primary-source materials, which include voluminous correspondence, diaries, scientific notebooks and journals, as well as newspaper clippings and other secondary sources, open a window into the scientific mind and nature of a preeminent American inventor and give firsthand accounts of American life and culture at the turn of the century.
Collection highlights and correspondence files available online reveal Bell the scientist-inventor-teacher-businessman as a loving husband, devoted son and father, attentive son-in-law and loyal friend. On Oct. 5, 1875, one month before they were engaged to be married, Bell wrote Mabel Hubbard a letter in reply to a note she had written to say proudly she had driven her carriage home safely—her first solo venture—after seeing him off at a rail station.
Bell wrote: "I felt indeed more anxious than I care to tell you when I saw you drive off from the station alone. The horse looked so spirited and you drove off so fast—that I felt I better lose my train than let you run any danger. However when you stopped at the corner I knew you had control over the horse—and so stepped on board the cars with a lighter heart."
A keeper of journals as well as a prolific letter writer, Mabel Hubbard Bell offered commentary on Bell family life and the social scene in Washington, D.C., where her parents, the Gardiner G. Hubbards, lived and Bell maintained a laboratory. On Jan. 6, 1879, she began a series of periodic journal entries in which she recorded a brief biography of her husband, noted the first vocalizations of their baby, Elsie, and recalled her earliest childhood memories.
Another letter from Bell to his wife, Mabel, a short note from December 1907.
"Became deaf at the house of my grandfather in New York when nearly five years old," she wrote. "Have no recollection of hearing except of a soft low sound I always called the singing of the frogs."
She wrote in her journal about her first meeting with Bell five years earlier, in the winter of 1874. Her mother had enrolled her in one of Bell's classes in articulation for the deaf in Cambridge, Mass. She had just returned to America from four years in Europe, where she had studied lip reading and learned of Bell's reputation as a teacher of the deaf.
"It was … with some interest not unmixed with prejudice that I first went to see the teacher of whom I had heard so much but whom I privately considered a quack doctor," she wrote. What he had to say was so interesting, she said, she was "forced to like to listen to him, but he himself I disliked—he dressed carelessly." The journal writer attributed to her youth—"I was not yet 16"—her assessment then that Bell seemed to lack the refinement of a "fine gentleman."
Her opinion of him changed the following summer. She had invited Bell to stay for tea during his visit to the Hubbards in Nantucket. Bell spoke of his "telegraph ideas," and "papa became so much interested that he offered to take a patent for him and from that day began the friendship that ended in our marriage." She continued lessons with Bell but observed that "his mind was then too full of telegraph ideas for much else."
Bell's letter to Thomas Gleason, August 1882, with
a diagram and plan for an artificial respirator device.
The death of a Bell's son to respiratory failure led to his development of this
forerunner of the iron lung.
Fascinated by Bell's ideas for transmitting vocalization by wire, Gardiner Hubbard encouraged telephone experimentation and applied for the telephone patent, which was issued on March 7, 1876. Hubbard became the first president of the Bell Telephone Co.
Mabel Hubbard Bell was said by one of her biographers, her son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor, the first editor of the National Geographic magazine, to have inspired Alexander Bell's experiments and his telephone invention as a means to enhance her ability to communicate. However, Bell's own mother was deaf, and his grandfather, father and uncle all taught "visible speech" in his native Edinburgh. Bell established a School of Vocal Physiology in Boston in 1872 and joined the Boston University faculty in 1873 as a professor of vocal physiology. During this time he was experimenting with the transmission of sound vibrations.
Both Bells were lifelong proponents of deaf education. Throughout his life Bell considered himself a teacher of the deaf; one of his pupils, with whom he long corresponded, was Helen Keller.
After nearly two decades of marriage, Bell still worried about the welfare of his independent wife. In two May 21, 1894, letters, the first addressed to "My dear little wifie" and the second to "My darling Mabel," Bell expressed his frustration that he could not communicate with her because she had not yet sent him an address from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they had bought a summer home in 1886. "If you are not comfortable, do not hesitate to come down to New York—you must not run any risk on account of difficulty," he advised. Hours later he wrote again: "Where are you? What are you doing? Why have you not telegraphed—or sent Halifax address?" He then described in detail an eye surgery he had seen performed that day on his mother-in-law. "Your mother is the bravest woman I know (excepting perhaps one other)," he wrote.
Bell's letter to Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, on the subject of the death of the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Maj. John Wesley Powell, Sept. 27, 1902.
Among Alexander Bell's correspondents was another scientist, Maj. John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 and 1871 led expeditions on a 1,000-mile journey to explore and chart the Grand Canyon. The geologist became director of the U.S. Geological Survey in March 1881. Letters to Bell family members during the 1890s indicate that Bell paid close attention to the health and welfare of his friend, who suffered from an old Civil War injury. After Powell died on Sept. 23, 1902, Bell wrote to S.P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, expressing his grief and his desire to carry out Powell's wishes pertaining to a Bureau of Ethnology, which, he said, Powell regarded as "his monument."
Items in the online collection cover the period of 1862 to 1939, but the bulk of the materials are from 1865 to 1920. In addition to files for correspondence and family papers, a separate subject file contains items relating to his inventions and scientific interests ranging from artificial respiration (following the death of a son to respiratory failure, Alexander Bell invented the forerunner of the iron lung) and aviation to the telephone. A laboratory notebook file contains images of more than 200 volumes of scientific notebooks. Other files contain Volume I of the Beinn Bhreagh Recorder, which Bell published to track the progress of his scientific research projects and family events at his summer home in Nova Scotia, and his articles and speeches.
This American Memory collection links to a Manuscript Division finding aid for 147,700 original items in 446 containers plus eight oversize containers, which together occupy 183.2 linear feet. Materials from the Alexander Graham Bell Family papers also have been preserved on 23 microfilm reels.
