People are impressed when they hear the world’s very first long-distance phone call went all the way to Paris.
Those people are not from Brantford.
They are usually out-of-town visitors to the Brantford home of Alexander Graham Bell.
The locals know Paris is a mere 12 kilometres up stream along the Grand River.
. . . . . . .
Still, it’s quite a feat to make the world’s third ever phone call from a device assembled the night before in your farmhouse bedroom. Bell had made the first ever phone call to the room next door in his lab at Boston University where he was teaching the deaf. “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you,” his assistant Thomas Watson heard coming through one of their experimental devices in the spring of 1876.
Today the Homestead looks very much like it did when the Bells lived here, with their original furniture, belongings, and models of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephones.
. . . . . . .
When school closed for the summer Bell returned to his father’s farm on the edge of Brantford and brought his experimental “liquid transmitter” with him. His second phone call in July, 1876 occurred all within his bedroom between Alexander and his father Melville.
And on Aug. 10, 1876 the third call was made by his father from a telegraph office in downtown Brantford to where Bell was waiting for it in Robert White’s Boot and Shoe Shop and Telegraph Office up stream in Paris, Ontario.
Robert White’s Boot and Shoe Shop and Telegraph Office in Paris, Ontario
. . . . . . .
There’s been some progress since then.
…….
Bell’s invention has been pressed to billions of ears everywhere in the world and you can stand in the unchanged bedroom where it all began. Curator Brian Wood has been telling the Bell story for 33 years since he was hired as a summer student to conduct tours through the Bell Homestead.
Wood tells much of the story while standing in Bell’s bedroom, which looks today much as it did in July, 1876. The bed is from the same era, but everything else in the room wears Bell’s fingerprints.
Bell Homestead Curator Brian Wood in the unchanged bedroom where it all began.
. . . . . .
The entire four bedroom home is as it was in July, 1876, other than it was rolled about 60 metres on logs back from the edge of the Grand River, where the clay banks were often collapsing.
Melville Bell had purchased a 10.5-acre farm in 1870 on the Grand to bring his family from London, England to hopefully save the life of his middle son Alex after losing his older and younger sons to TB. Alex needed a drier atmosphere to survive.
At the Bell Homestead in Brantford, Bell’s bedroom was added to the back right corner of the house.
. . . . . . .
Bell spent many hours sitting on the south bank of the Grand River at the back of the family farm contemplating many of his creative ideas. It was the undulating current of the Grand River that gave Bell the idea that undulating sound waves could be transmitted over wires and duplicate the original sound.
Melville was a medical professor in London who believed deaf students should not be taught sign language, but rather learn to talk by watching how the tongue and lips formed to create sounds vibrating from the throat.
CHART VI – Visible Speech, developed by Alexander Graham Bell’s father, Melville Bell, was a system of symbols to aid people in speaking words in any language even if they had not heard it, by watching how the tongue and lips formed to create sounds. Bell’s advocacy for the deaf was a constant theme in his life. Both his mother and wife were profoundly deaf.
. . . . . . .
Melville’s wife was deaf by the time Alexander was born. Alex said his mother could hear him talk if his lips were pressed to her forehead.
She was an accomplished and noted artist in England and the Bell Homestead today displays many of her paintings, including her three sons when they were alive.
Bell’s workstation in his bedroom at the Bell Homestead in Brantford
. . . . . . .
Bell’s invention lead to the creation of the Bell Telephone Company and made him a wealthy man. In 1881 Bell moved to Washington D.C. and opened a new laboratory to pursue his eclectic mechanical ideas.
Washington’s summer heat bothered his health so he created a summer cottage on 640 acres on Cape Breton Island where he worked on a variety of his inventions – such as the Silver Dart – the first powered flight in the British Empire off the ice of Baddeck Bay on Bras d’Or Lake in February 1909, six years after the Wright Brothers first flew in North Carolina.
An experimental hydrofoil speeding around Bras d’Or Lake.
– photo courtesy of the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, Cape Breton Island
. . . . . . .
His hydrofoil flying boat designed and built at his Cape Breton laboratory set a world marine speed record of 70 mph in 1919. The hydrofoil is on display at the Bell Museum on Cape Breton. Bell retired to his summer home and lived half his life there where he died at age 75 in August 1922. He and his wife are buried on the Cape Breton estate.
Bell’s farmhouse in Brantford, from the front
. . . . . . .
Alexander Graham Bell’s Brantford home was donated to the city by Bell Canada and opened as a museum in 1910. Queen Elizabeth ll visited the farmhouse in 1977 and declared it a National Historic Site.
If you plan to visit, make sure to check beforehand for any related COVID-19 restrictions in place.
Bell certainly had an interesting life.