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Bell's Osborne Telephone
From: Science Museum
| By:
Roger Bridgman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
When Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his invention to Queen Victoria at Osborne in January 1878, neither probably realised the changes which the telephone would subsequently bring to world communications. One of the telephones used in that demonstration has been preserved in the Science Museum, London. Roger Bridgman, curator, communications, tells its story. |
 n 1981 the American communications corporation AT&T came up with the slogan 'Reach out and touch someone'. The idea was simply to get customers to make more use of the telephone, but the phrase evoked echoes of an incident that had occurred in England 103 years earlier. |
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| Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). | |
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone and effectively the founder of AT&T, came from a Scottish family obsessed with speech and hearing. His grandfather, father and uncle all ran speech and elocution practices. His father married a deaf girl who became Bell's mother. Bell in turn became a speech practitioner in Boston, Massachusetts and married one of his clients, a young woman who was profoundly deaf. |
It was possibly this familiarity with the problems of the deaf which led Bell into his royal faux pas of 1878. Bell had been invited to demonstrate the telephone to Queen Victoria at her residence, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. On the evening of 14 January, contact was duly made with nearby Osborne Cottage and also with Cowes, Southampton and London. Among the telephones used was the instrument now in the Science Museum. |
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| Bell's telephone used as transmitter and receiver. | |
At some critical point of the demonstration, the Queen turned away from her telephone. Bell, used to attracting the attention of the deaf, leaned over and touched her arm, becoming the first commoner in years to lay hands on royalty without permission. Queen Victoria may or may not have been amused, but it certainly gave Bell unlooked-for publicity in court circles. 'Reach out and touch someone,' the slogan might have read, 'preferably royalty.' |
The walnut and ivory decoration lavished on this crude telephone by instrument makers Julius Sax and Company indicates how eager Bell was to impress. By 1878 the telephone, revealed in America in 1876, was familiar to British technical specialists through the lectures and demonstrations given by the British physicist Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) and Sir William Preece (1834-1913), Engineer-in-Chief of the Post Office. But the big push towards commercial success was just starting, and Bell needed all the patronage he could get. He employed one of the world's first public relations advisers, the American journalist Kate Field who, as well as being on hand to sing down the telephone to Queen Victoria from Osborne Cottage, kept newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic amply supplied with material. |
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| New Year's greetings by telephone, 1882. | |
Field's accounts picture the Osborne demonstration as a jolly entertainment, with singing and laughter heard distinctly over the wires, but it was in reality only a partial success. The line from Cowes failed, and the line from London was so bad that Bell did not attempt to transmit speech, confining himself to the tones of an organ. There were clearly many practical problems still to be overcome. |
One of these was the question of the transmitter. The Bell telephone used identical devices for transmitter and receiver, each consisting of an iron diaphragm, a magnet and a coil of wire. Sound waves made the diaphragm move, producing electric currents in the coil and sending electric waves down the line to the receiver. Here the effect was reversed, with currents in the coil moving the iron diaphragm, recreating the original sound. However the system lacked any amplification, making its range frustratingly limited. It was Thomas Edison (1847-1931) who, a month after the Osborne demonstration, patented the amplifying carbon microphone and provided a partial solution to the problem of transmitting telephone signals over long distances. |
 This instrument is one of several thought to have survived from the Osborne demonstration. There are three in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and one at the AT&T Archive in Warren, New Jersey, although all these lack the handsome wooden switchplate provided by Sax. This one is labelled 'Osborne Cottage' and was probably used not by Queen Victoria but by her equerry Sir Thomas Biddulph and his wife. They are reported as having conversed with the Queen, while Kate Field, after her vocal contribution, had to make do with Queen Victoria's thanks relayed by the Duke of Connaught. Following the demonstration, the Queen, in spite of describing the telephone in her journal as 'rather faint', was sufficiently impressed to ask Bell if he would sell two of the instruments left at Osborne. This appears never to have happened. |
We take the telephone so much for granted now that it is difficult to recapture the frisson that Bell's tinny simulations of human speech must have elicited. Still less can we imagine the social confusion created by this unfamiliar visitor who could enter a house without being presented at the front door. Or perhaps we can. How did you feel when you first saw or used a mobile phone? The era of truly personal telecommunication, as well as resting on Bell's fundamental invention, enables us to appreciate its impact on those who, like Queen Victoria at Osborne, witnessed it when it was new. |
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