The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

his father was “not enthusiastic over the result.”
    Bell remained famously clumsy with mechanical devices throughout his life. But he was always exceptionally proficient in the conceptual realm. A bright and dutiful child, he inherited his fascination with speech, sound, and the emerging field of acoustics much as one would inherit a trade. Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, at the beginning of the second decade of the rule of Queen Victoria. Britain was entering an age of industrial expansion. Science and rationality were ascendant. And Bell’s family had built the scientific study of speech into a kind of Victorian-era cottage industry.
    Bell’s paternal grandfather and namesake, Alexander Bell, taught elocution. So did Bell’s uncle David Bell, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who published enormously popular texts on the subject and even developed a system called “Visible Speech” that became world-renowned in its day. Visible Speech, in wonderfully grand, Victorian style, attempted to systematically catalog all possible human vocal sounds by assigning each a written symbol that represented the placement of the tongue and lips as the particular sound was uttered.
    If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because George Bernard Shaw, a family acquaintance, immortalized Melville Bell’s system in his play Pygmalion (the basis of the subsequent musical My Fair Lady). Shaw’s preface to the play even mentions “the illustrious Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible Speech.” And, coincidentally or not, Shaw gives his memorable character Professor Henry Higgins an address just minutes away from the actual spot on Harrington Square in London where Grandfather Alexander Bell tutored students.
    Shaw’s Professor Higgins—as erudite as he is overbearing—surely draws upon the tendency toward grandiosity and stern reverence for science displayed by the real-life patriarchs of the Bell family. Grandfather Bell taught an eclectic assortment of adults with stammers and other speech impediments as well as children whose upwardly mobile families wanted them to improve their elocution. Young Aleck Bell himself was carefully schooled in elocution and high-society etiquette at the hands of both his father and grandfather—not entirely unlike Higgins’s pupil Liza Doolittle, Shaw’s protagonist in Pygmalion .
    At the age of fifteen, for instance, the family sent Aleck from their home in Edinburgh to live for a year with his grandfather in London. Bell invariably thereafter called the experience a turning point in his life. During his stay, Aleck worked intensively under his grandfather’s tutelage to polish his diction and accent by reading Shakespeare aloud. And elocution lessons were just part of his training. Grandfather Alexander also required him to don a suit jacket and top hat, and even to carry a cane—a teenaged caricature of a dapper Englishman, much like one Shaw himself might have conjured.
    Around this time, Melville Bell’s system of Visible Speech was attracting interest throughout Britain. It fit the times perfectly, melding a grandiose scientific approach with the appealing, egalitarian prospect of self-betterment. Aleck, as a teenager, became one of its most well-versed practitioners and even took part in his father’s frequent lectures. Like a showman’s sidekick, Aleck would wait offstage and out of ear-shot while his father asked members of the audience to suggest difficult or unusual sounds—including words in any language—writing on a chalkboard the distinctive phonetic symbols he had invented for the sounds. Aleck would then return and pronounce sounds he had never heard to illustrate the viability of his father’s linguistic scheme.
    As Bell later recalled, the symbols at one such lecture called for him to blow a puff of air while the tip of his tongue touched the roof of his mouth. Following his father’s written instruction, Aleck made the odd sound and